I built a Chrome extension that explains PMM charts with AI — looking for feedback

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM)
1

Hey everyone :waving_hand:

I want to share a small side project I’ve been working on and get some feedback
from the community.

The problem

I spend a lot of time in PMM dashboards, and honestly — I don’t always know what
every chart is telling me. Some panels are self-explanatory, but others have complex
PromQL queries, multiple series, and metric names that require context to interpret.
My usual workflow was: take a screenshot, copy the query, open ChatGPT, paste
everything manually, ask “what does this mean?” — and repeat for every panel.

That got old fast.

What I built

PMM Chart AI Explainer — a Chrome extension that adds a small AI button
to every panel on your PMM dashboard. Click it, and within a few seconds you get
an AI-generated explanation of what the metric measures, whether anything looks
abnormal, and what to do about it.

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Under the hood it:

  • Intercepts the real executed PromQL (with substituted variables, not templates)
  • Takes a cropped screenshot of just that panel
  • Optionally reads the actual data values from Inspect → Data
  • Sends everything to OpenAI GPT-4o Vision with a structured prompt
  • Automatically identifies the database type from metric prefixes
    (mysql_, pg_, mongodb_, node_, etc.)

The response always includes what the metric measures and related PMM panels
to check — and only flags anomalies if something actually looks wrong,
so it won’t invent problems on a healthy system.

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There’s also a Debug Mode if you want to see exactly what prompt and screenshot
are sent before making any API call:

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Privacy & cost

The extension uses your own OpenAI API key — nothing goes through any
intermediate server. The key lives in your local Chrome profile and is sent
only to api.openai.com. A typical analysis costs around $0.01, so $1
is more than enough to go through an entire PMM instance.

How to try it

  1. Clone the repo: GitHub - dbazhenov/pmm-chart-ai-explainer: Chrome extension that adds AI-powered chart analysis to Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) dashboards using OpenAI GPT-4o Vision · GitHub
  2. Open chrome://extensions, enable Developer mode
  3. Click Load unpacked → select the extension/ folder
  4. Add your OpenAI API key in the popup
  5. Open any PMM dashboard and click AI on any panel

Looking for feedback

This is an early version and I’d love to hear from people who actually use PMM
day to day:

  • Does the AI explanation match what you’d expect from that panel?
  • Are there panel types or metric families where it gets confused?
  • What would make this more useful in your workflow?

Any feedback — bug reports, ideas, or just “this helped me understand X” —
is very welcome. The repo has a CONTRIBUTING guide if anyone wants to jump in.

Thanks for reading :folded_hands: