Brendan Gregg’s USE (Utilization, Saturation, Errors) method for monitoring is quite known. There are even some monitoring dashboard templates shared on the Internet. There’s also Tom Wilkie’s RED (Rate, Errors, Durations) method, which is suggested to be better suited to monitor microservices than USE. We, at okmeter.io, recently updated our PgBouncer monitoring plugin and while doing that we’ve tried to comb everything and we used USE and RED as frameworks to do so.

Any changes to a Postgresql database first of all are saved in Write-Ahead log, so they will never get lost. Only after that actual changes are made to the data in memory pages (in so called buffer cache) and these pages are marked dirty — meaning they need to be synced to disk later.