Hi,
I’d like to try and get some insight into what are the advantages, if any, of using PMM2 over Datadog’s MySQL integration.
Best Regards,
Fred Leeflang
I know you had a bit of a chat going in the IRC channel but far fewer people see that so I thought I’d comment on the GDPR piece here. I’m by no means an expert in GDPR but have had to comply in past lives.
There isn’t a requirement to host data in the EU to meet GDPR from a data processor standpoint (typically the company hosting the platform) however the data owner (typically the account holder in the case of a SaaS product) MUST disclose to it’s customers/users what data is being captured and that it will leave the confines of the EU. I think some companies just find it easier to host inside the EU to not have to worry about that one element since there can be many layers of contracts between different entities that make it messy.
Since PMM is something you host you’re not as likely to face GDPR issues but that doesn’t mean you won’t. If you’re a US based company with users of your product in the EU (that must signup and provide certain PII) even if the Database is housed in the EU but you monitor with PMM in a datacenter in the US, you’ll need to be aware that Query Analytics can send query examples that now export PII which may require disclosure to your customers (or customer’s customers). No matter where you host the data GDPR has pretty strict requirements on requirements to be forgotten which I find is the bigger challenge particularly when partnering with a SaaS provider…it’s not just about deleting the data the customer wanted deleted but also the backups which isn’t easy when you’re 1 of thousands of customers in that backup (not impossible but unlikely that smaller companies will promise anything beyond "we’ll delete it from the live DB but it’ll have to “age out” of our backups.
That all said I haven’t used datadog in a production environment so will leave to others to commend there but from my looking at other players in the space, a big difference between PMM and Datadog is you host vs they host, Free/Open Source client and server vs Open Source client only. I do like the way they present information far better than PMM so we’ve got some serious catching up to do in terms of UI/UX. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and talking to several members of their team and I don’t have a bad thing to say about any of them, super smart folks!
Thanks Steve! Myself I’m not so familiar (yet) with Datadog. I’ve had a good few days of experience setting up PMM2 (not always very easy to do as the documentation here and there seems to be somewhat lacking) and I don’t like it so much tbh that it’s contained in a Docker container and I can’t simply install the server using deb’s. That said, PMM2 is an excellent tool and I like QAN a lot, it has already helped me on 2 occasions to give good advice to a customer, so keep up the good work!