Monitoring MySQL Product Options

I’ve had plenty of comments on specific products to Monitoring MySQL Options before providing the completed list. Here are the results from my survey to give everybody a more complete list.

Nagios 25 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
MONyog 8 xxxxxxxx
Cacti 4 xxxx
Munin 3 xxx
MySQL Enterprise Monitor/Merlin 3 xxx
Hyperic 2 xx
KontrolBase 2 xx
Zabbix 2 xx
Big Brother 1 x
iGlass 1 x
MyDBA 1 x
MySQL AR 1 x
pacemaker 1 x
Panopta 1 x
Opsview 1 x
Monit 1 x
Tivoli 1 x

NOTE: Some answers included multiple products, these are all counted separately in the above figures.

There are a few products that are not listed at Monitoring MySQL in this list.

If you want to list what you use, please continue to use the MySQL Alert Monitoring Survey. Thanks to all those that replied.

Monitoring MySQL options

My recent poll What alert monitoring do you use? showed 25% of the 58 respondents to bravely state they had no MySQL monitoring. I see 1 in 3, ~33% in my consulting so this is consistent.


There is no excuse to not have some MySQL Monitoring on your production system. At the worse case, you should be logging important MySQL information for later analysis. I use my own Logging and Analyzing scripts on every client for an immediate assessment regardless of what’s available. I combine that with my modified statpack to give me immediate text based analysis, broken down by hour chunks for quick reference. These help me in troubleshooting, but they are not a complete solution.

The most popular options I see and are also reflected in the results are:

There is a good list, including some products I did not know. My goal is to get this information included in the Monitoring-MySQL information site.

I have some additional information on Cacti and MONyog, and I’ll be sharing this information in upcoming posts.

What do you monitor in MySQL?

If you are unfamiliar with what to monitor in MySQL, starting with looking at what popular Monitoring products monitor. For example, the following is the list of MySQL Cacti Plugin measurements.

Innodb Buffer Pool Activity

  • Pages Created
  • Pages Written
  • Pages Read

Innodb Buffer Pool Pages

  • Pool Size
  • Database Pages
  • Free Pages
  • Modified Pages

Inoodb File I/O

  • File Reads
  • Files Writes
  • Log Writes
  • File Fsyncs

Innodb Pending I/O

  • Aio Log Ios
  • Aio Sync ios
  • Buffer Pool Flushes
  • Chkp Writes
  • Ibuf Aio Reads
  • Log Flushes
  • Log Writes
  • Normal Aio Reads
  • Normal Aio Writes

Innodb Insert Buffer

  • Inserts
  • Merged
  • Merges

Innodb Log

  • Log Buffer Size
  • Log Bytes Written
  • Log Bytes Flushed
  • Unflushed Log

Innodb Row Operations

  • Rows Read
  • Rows Deleted
  • Rows Updated
  • Rows Inserted

Innodb Semaphores

  • Spin Rounds
  • Spin Waits
  • OS Waits

Innodb Transactions

  • Innodb Transactions
  • Current Transactions
  • History List
  • Read Views

MySQL Binary/Relay Logs

  • Binlog Cache use
  • Binlog Cache Disk Use
  • Binary Log Space
  • Relay Log Space

MySQL Command Counters

  • Questions
  • SELECT
  • DELETE
  • INSERT
  • UPDATE
  • REPLACE
  • LOAD
  • DELETE MULTI
  • INSERT SELECT
  • UPDATE MULTI
  • REPLACE SELECT

MySQL Connections

  • Max Connections
  • Max Used Connections
  • Aborted Clients
  • Aborted Connects
  • Threads Connected
  • Connections

MySQL Files and Tables

  • Table Cache
  • Open Tables
  • Open Files
  • Opened Tables

MySQL Network Traffic

  • Bytes Received
  • Bytes Sent

MySQL Processlist

  • State Closing Tables
  • State Copying to Tmp Table
  • State End
  • State Freeing Items
  • State Init
  • State Locked
  • State Login
  • State Preparing
  • State Reading From Net
  • State Sending Data
  • State Sorting Result
  • State Statistics
  • State Updating
  • State Writing to Net
  • State None
  • State Other

MySQL Query Cache

  • Queries In Cache
  • Hits
  • Inserts
  • Not Cached
  • Lowmem Prunes

MySQL Query Cache Memory

  • Query Cache Size
  • Free Memory
  • Total Blocks
  • Free Blocks

MySQL Replication

  • Slave Running
  • Slave Stopped
  • Slave Lag
  • Slave Open Temp Tables
  • Slave Retried Transactions

MySQL Select Types

  • Select Full Join
  • Select Full Range Join
  • Select Range
  • Select Range Check
  • Select Scan

MySQL Sorts

  • Sort Rows
  • Sort Range
  • Sort Merge Passes
  • Sort Scan

MySQL Table Locks

  • Table Locks Immediate
  • Table Locks Waited
  • Slow Queries

MySQL Temporary Objects

  • Created Tmp Tables
  • Created Tmp Disk Tables
  • Created Tmp Files

MySQL Threads

  • Thread Cache Size
  • Threads Created