Re: What do people like to monitor (or in other words, what might be nice in pgsnmpd)?

On Wed, 2007-08-01 at 20:41 -0600, Josh Tolley wrote:
> So please respond, if you feel so inclined, describing things you like
> to monitor in your PostgreSQL instances as well as things you would
> like to be able to easily monitor in a more ideal world. Many thanks,
> and apologies for any breach of netiquette I may have committed in
> posting to two lists simultaneously.

I think there's also a related question here: can we develop
implementations of these measurements that satisfy a lot of DBAs?

For instance, when I measure idle transactions, I poll periodically for
any transactions that have been idle for more than 1 minute. That's
simple and probably useful to a lot of DBAs to catch certain types of
problems. This would probably be useful as a trap, or could be polled.

However, some of the ideas, like trying to come up with numbers that
represent the amount of time queries are waiting on locks, or the
behavior of checkpoints/bgwriter, aren't as obvious to me. If one person
posts their script to monitor one of these things, will other DBAs want
to use the same instrumentation, or would they end up reinventing it
anyway? Can the numbers be effectively graphed with something like
OpenNMS on a 5-minute poll interval, and maybe have effective thresholds
for notifications?

I think -- even aside from pgsnmpd -- a lot of people would be
interested in seeing a variety of monitoring/notification scripts used
by other DBAs.

Also, here are some relevant pgfoundry projects:
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/nagiosplugins/
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgtools/

Regards,
Jeff Davis