We want your feedback to make PMM even better!

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM)
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1

Hello folks using PMM :wave:

First things first, thank you for your loyalty and for liking PMM :heart: Your use of PMM and what you share has been invaluable in helping shape PMM into what it is today. Thank you :star2:

Quick intro about me, i’m Pedro, part of the PMM development team. I work as a product designer, helping improve the user experience and tracking the major pain points you all face while using PMM.

We’re committed to making PMM even better, and to do that, we need your help! :rocket: We’re reaching out to gather your thoughts on how we can enhance PMM to meet your needs.

We’d love to hear from you:

  1. :thinking: What are the top three challenges you’ve faced while using PMM?
  2. :smiley: Are there any features or improvements you’d like to see in future versions?
  3. :grimacing: : Can you share any specific experiences where PMM didn’t meet your expectations?

Your feedback is crucial and will directly impact the improvements we prioritize in future releases. Please share your thoughts by replying here. Let’s talk about it.

Thank you for taking the time to help! We look forward to your feedback!

2

Hey @pedro.fernandes,
As an almost-daily PMM user with Percona customers, I have some feedback with my frustrations.

  1. A) Sticky selections are my #1 complaint. If I select ‘Node 1’, ‘Service A’ in the menus, then navigate somewhere else, my selection is not persisted. Same goes for date range, and timezone. I really wish my selections persisted as I moved through PMM. This really makes me rage quit.

    B) QAN EXPLAIN not working. This is usually due to the query being too long, and getting truncated by either MySQL or by PMM. It would be awesome if PMM could recognize truncated queries and pop up a message saying “hey, you should increase X variable in MySQL so this long query isn’t truncated.”

    C) Navigation menus move. Oohhh, this one is so frustrating too. The navigation menus in the upper right move all the time. Sometimes ‘MySQL’ menu is in the upper right corner, sometimes it wraps below and shows up on the far left side. More rage quit. This has been an issue since PMM 2.0.0.

  2. A) Feedback from PMM on misconfigured servers. (Like B above) Many times, out-of-box PMM has an issue with displaying a graph (ie: no data), or cannot parse queries (QAN) due completely to the configuration of the MySQL server. PMM should easily be able to detect this and inform the user. Big notice banners across the top “InnoDB Table Monitors are not enabled. Several graphs below will be empty. Recommend SET GLOBAL innodb_table_monitors=ALL” or something similar. To clarify, this is not ‘advisors’ for having a better MySQL, this is “hey, your mysql is not configured correctly to maximize PMM”

    B) QAN Query example timestamp. When you look at an ‘Example’ in QAN, there’s no indication of when that example was taken. How often are examples taken? Can I change how often?

  3. PMM does not let me change node names, or service names after I’ve added a new node. The only option is to delete it, and re-add. This seems extremely simple thing to let users do. When you delete/re-add, you lose the data from the old name. Same with labels, region, cluster name, etc. All of these should be editable and changeable. Maybe when I first started using PMM I didn’t have a cluster, or multiple regions. Now I do, and now I want to organize my servers in PMM. I can’t. I can’t modify their tags/labels/names.

Cheers,
Matthew

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  1. Query Analytics Tables tab shows details from a single table, even when the query includes several tables. It should show the CREATE TABLE, INDEX STATUS, and TABLE STATUS for all tables included in the query.
  2. There should be a way to tag a query as “Reviewed” and then filter out these queries.
  3. Query Parsing should be on by default.
  4. --max-query-length should be significantly greater than 2048, it should be 50,000 or larger so that we simply don’t see truncated queries in the EXPLAIN, since this also breaks the Tables tab.
  5. Do not display the PostgreSQL pmm-server queries in Query Analytics. There is ZERO use case for where these would be reviewed. In fact they are counter-productive as a freshly deployed PMM instance with zero connected external databases will still show activity in Query Analytics. It just distracts from actionable data. It would be vastly superior to simply see a blank PMM Query Analytics, and throw a message saying “no instances defined” or “instances defined but query sources are empty”.
  6. UI should hint when a Customer has enabled PMM Query Analytics from Perf Schema but the server is configured for performance_schema=OFF. And also send a UI hint when performance_schema=ON but query digest tables are not enabled.
  7. UI should hint when PMM Query Analytics is configured for slowlog but when MySQL’s slow_query_log=OFF. This aids in diagnosing why PMM is configured correctly but no queries are showing up in QAN.
  8. UI should hint for PMM Query Analytics what the long_query_time value is per MySQL service. While we can sort of figure this out by looking at what the fastest query is, it is more efficient if QAN would just show this per service.
  9. Selecting multiple filters in Query Analytics forces the filters bar to be reloaded, which is frustrating as sometimes the list is large and you need to keep scrolling back down to find additional conditions you want to include in the filter.
  10. In Query Analytics, the definition for Load is vague and often mis-understood. This should be clarified in the UI.
  11. The UI should hint at the query source for each service, whether it is Performance Schema vs slowlog. While you can determine query source by going into the Details tab and evaluating if you have the basic 5 fields from PerfSchema or whether you see the additional fields enabled by SLow log. But this is tedious and not always clear to the average user.
  12. Users who leverage Percona Server slow log features such as rate limiting should see extrapolated values for QPS and all other metrics in Query Analytics. For example a customer that enables log rate filtering at 1% and the UI shows 1 QPS, instead the UI should hint “log rate limiting in effect, actual QPS estimated at 100 QPS”.
  13. Query Analytics should have a Copy button for the Example field, so that users can extract the Query and run it in their own environment without having to carefully select the fields. The Copy button should also clean up any non-printable characters so that the SQL statement is considered valid (maybe would need an SQL linter to be applied first).
4

Hi,
A feature request. SSM (GitHub - shatteredsilicon/ssm-server: PMM Server, a fork of PPMv1) has a feature to recommend tunings. Taking into account historical statistics, it can suggest better (than current configured) settings for things such as buffersize, etc, etc. I’m sure you can think of many more.
We find it valuable.

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Hi @pedro.fernandes

Here are the features and issues that we are expecting ASAP.

  1. QAN PostgreSQL EXPLAIN plan is not providing enough details like MySQL.
    [PMM-13455] QAN PostgreSQL EXPLAIN plan is not providing enough details like MySQL - Percona JIRA

  2. Schemaname is empty and example tab $ values for queries in the QAN for PostgreSQL DB.
    Jira
    Jira

  3. Jira

  4. Jira

  5. Jira

  6. Jira

  7. Jira
    Jira

  8. Jira

  9. Jira

  10. No error log monitoring for MariaDB, PostgreSQL or MongoDB like MonYOG.

  11. No my.cnf or mongod.conf or postgresql.conf change alert like MonYog.

  12. Example Query is truncating for longer queries on the QAN dashboard:[Jira]

  13. Custom queries are not working in the PostgreSQL DB.
    Jira

  14. QAN does not show the PostgreSQL queries with Full Table scan

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Hey @Naresh9999,
#10, PMM does support this:

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Hi @matthewb

Thanks for the details. I will try to implement Grafan loki and let you know.

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Interesting and crucial feedback, folks! Thank you!

We will embed these into our current brainstorming sessions. We will look into prioritizing them and adding them to future versions.

Is anyone else in the forum community interested in adding more feedback or corroborating the above points?