My Journey into Postgres Monitoring with Lukas Fittl & Rob Treat

Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano

Do you monitor your Postgres error logs for gold? Lukas Fittl and Rob Treat join Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia on the Path To Citus Con* podcast for developers who love Postgres—to discuss their respective journeys into Postgres monitoring. Have you ever asked yourself: “Why is my query so slow?” Or had to figure out which query is slowing things down? Or why your database server is at 90% CPU? There are so many ways to monitor Postgres: pganalyze, pgMustard, pgBadger, pgDash, your cloud provider’s Query Performance Insights, pg_stat_statements, pg_stat_io, & more. If you’re running Postgres on a managed service, what kinds of things do you need to monitor & optimize for (vs. what will your cloud service provider do)? There’s also a segue on monitoring vs. observability: what’s the difference?

*[Update: July 2024] Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes from Path To Citus Con—now called Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano—can be found here: https://talkingpostgres.com

Links mentioned in this episode:

• OpenTelemetry: https://opentelemetry.io/
• pganalyze: https://pganalyze.com/
• pgDash: https://pgdash.io/
• pgMustard: https://www.pgmustard.com/
• pg_stat_statements docs: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/pgstatstatements.html
• pg_hint_plan: https://github.com/ossc-db/pg_hint_plan
• pg_hint_plan hint list: https://github.com/ossc-db/pg_hint_plan/blob/master/docs/hint_list.md
• Example for PostgreSQL with pg_hint_plan: https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/QueryMethods.html#method-i-optimizer_hints
• 5mins of Postgres by pganalyze: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhqxwIAgz78HZhWyu3UyKrCWNk7VWjVpj
• Monitoring page on PostgreSQL wiki: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Monitoring
• PgHero GitHub repo: https://github.com/ankane/pghero
• Insights on pgBadger: A PGSQL Phriday #010 Recap: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-database-for-postgresql/community-insights-on-pgbadger-a-pgsql-phriday-010-recap/ba-p/3880911
• Get PostgreSQL Logs Into Honeycomb: https://docs.honeycomb.io/getting-data-in/logs/postgresql/
• Blog post by Lukas Fittl about pg_stat_io by Lukas: https://pganalyze.com/blog/pg-stat-io
• Blog post by Andrew Atkinson about pg_stat_io: https://andyatkinson.com/blog/2023/11/01/PostgreSQL-IO-Visibility-wehack-pg_stat_io
• BPFtrace by iovisor GitHub repo: https://github.com/iovisor/bpftrace
• Trace PostgreSQL locks with pg_lock_tracer: https://jnidzwetzki.github.io/2023/01/11/trace-postgresql-locks-with-pg-lock-tracer.html
• sysdig by draios GitHub repo: https://github.com/draios/sysdig
• Using BPFtrace to trace PostgreSQL vacuum operations: https://www.timescale.com/blog/using-bpftrace-to-trace-postgresql-vacuum-operations/
• PostgreSQL Mailing Lists: https://www.postgresql.org/list/
• psql — PostgreSQL interactive terminal: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/app-psql.html
• Ongoing discussion thread about pg_stat_statements: https://commitfest.postgresql.org/46/2837/
• Reconnoiter project referenced by Rob: https://github.com/circonus-labs/reconnoiter/tree/master/sql
• Funny tweet about PostgreSQL pronunciation: https://twitter.com/as_w/status/1648373353214885892
• O11ycast EP63 with Lukas Fittl: https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/o11ycast/ep-63-observability-in-the-database-with-lukas-fittl-of-pganalyze
• Oxide and Friends podcast: https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/