Running PMM/Percona in production to monitor Amazon RDS DBs

PostgreSQL Percona Operator for PostgreSQL
1

Hello,

I am starting to evaluate PMM and Percona as a replacement to Opentelemetry’s postgresqlreceiver to monitor metrics/logs/traces from Amazon RDS PostgreSQL databases as well as some EC2 instances.

What’s the best way to perform a PoC in a dev environment? Helm and EKS preferred.

Also, is there a documentation to run Percona/PMM in a EKS production setting?

Thanks in advance.

2

Here ya go: Helm - Percona Monitoring and Management

3

@matthewb Thank you for linking the documentation.

Is there a way to install PMM and monitor a DB which is in-cluster? Because we don’t have an RDS in dev environment.

I am trying to run a postgres DB in-cluster and monitor that DB via PMM.

Also, the end result is to get PMM integrated with Grafana. Is there a documentation for that?

4

That’s pretty much what PMM does.

PMM includes Grafana, so you won’t have to mess with that. Are you aware that PMM is both a server (to collect and visualize data with web UI), and a client agent (lives on the host to collect)?

Based on your questions, I highly recommend that you read the beginner aspects of our documentation. You need to first install PMM Server (using the helm chart), and then install the PMM client agents in your db instances.

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5

Yes, I was reading the documentation but got confused with certain aspects and the reason for reaching out here for guidance.

Thank you!

6

Make sure to read over ‘Architecture’ and ‘UI Components’ to get a better overall understanding of how PMM works.

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@matthewb To monitor a Amazon RDS instance, looks like we cannot install the pmm-client directly on the RDS but need an EC2 that can connect to RDS to scrape the data.

Is this the current solution? It would be an overhead to maintain an additional infrastructure. Is there any other alternative?

8

That is correct.

There is no other solution. In order to monitor any server that you do not have shell access, you must have a remote source.

You don’t have to use EC2. You said above that this was an EKS environment and that you wanted a helm chart? Use that in your EKS to deploy a PMM server.

9

I have used the helm chart to deploy a pmm-server, but to install the pmm-client to monitor RDS instance, is there an other way to deploy without having an EC2 to connect to an RDS?

pmm-server is good and working. I am wondering if there is a better way to install the pmm-client on RDS instances to monitor them?

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We established above that you cannot install the client on an RDS host, so there must be another method to monitoring them.

Great. Now, go into the PMM web UI, click PMM Inventory and then ‘Add RDS Instance’. Enter the details and that should be it.

11

That worked. Now I don’t have to worry about having another piece of infrastructure to manage.

Just want to confirm another thing, we want to integrate pmm to already existing Grafana instance which is our observability platform. Per the docs, it says we can expose pmm as a prometheus endpoint and add it to Grafana as a datasource. Is my understanding right? or is there another way?

12

That’s probably the best way, according to our docs.

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