Experimental Percona Monitoring and ManagementIn this blog post, we’ll introduce how you can look at some experimental Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) features using Percona Labs builds on GitHub.

Note: PerconaLabs and Percona-QA are open source GitHub repositories for unofficial scripts and tools created by Percona staff. While not covered by Percona support or services agreements, these handy utilities can help you save time and effort.

Percona software builds located in the PerconaLabs and Percona-QA repositories are not officially released software, and also aren’t covered by Percona support or services agreements. 

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) is a free and open-source platform for managing and monitoring MySQL® and MongoDB® performance. You can run PMM in your environment for maximum security and reliability. It provides thorough time-based analysis for MySQL and MongoDB servers to ensure that your data works as efficiently as possible.

This month we’re announcing access to Percona Labs builds of Percona Monitoring and Management so that you can experiment with new functionality that’s not yet in our mainline product. You can identify the unique builds at:

https://hub.docker.com/r/perconalab/pmm-server/tags/

Most of the entries here are the pre-release candidate images we use for QA, and they follow a format of all integers (for example “201802061627”). You’re fine to use these images, but they aren’t the ones that have the experimental functionality.

Today we have two builds of note (these DO have the experimental functionality):

  • 1.6.0-prom2.1
  • 1.5.3-prometheus2

We’re highlighting Prometheus 2.1 on top of our January 1.6 release (1.6.0-prom2.1), available in Docker format. Some of the reasons you might want to deploy this experimental build to take advantage of the Prometheus 2 benefits are:

  • Reduced CPU usage by Prometheus, meaning you can add more hosts to your PMM Server
  • Performance improvements, meaning dashboards load faster
  • Reduced disk I/O, disk space usage

Please keep in mind that as this is a Percona Labs build (see our note above), so in addition note the following two criteria:

  • Support is available from our Percona Monitoring and Management Forums
  • Upgrades might not work – don’t count on upgrading out of this version to a newer release (although it’s not guaranteed to block upgrades)

How to Deploy an Experimental Build from Percona Labs

The great news is that you can follow our Deployment Instructions for Docker, and the only change is where you specify a different Docker container to pull. For example, the standard way to deploy the latest stable PMM Server release with Docker is:

To use the Percona Labs build 1.6.0-prom2.1 with Prometheus 2.1, execute the following:

Please share your feedback on this build on our Percona Monitoring and Management Forums.

If you’re looking to deploy Percona’s officially released PMM Server (not the Percona Labs release, but our mainline version which currently is release 1.7) into a production environment, I encourage you to consider a Percona Support contract, which includes PMM at no additional charge!