AppSignal was built because we were tired of slow and clumsy monitoring setups. Instead, we built monitoring that’s easy yet powerful - an intuitive interface enables you to figure out what’s happening in no time. Today, our team made finding slow events effortless. We’ve fully overhauled our slow events feature, helping developers to quickly find and fix slow queries and API requests.

MySQL is the de facto choice for open-source relational databases, and you should learn how to use MySQL database logs to improve efficiency and security. As an open-source product, it is free to use and has a large and active developer community. It is crucial to understand how to diagnose and monitor the performance of a MySQL instance in the long run. Logs to the rescue!

While tuning the performance of your application at the code level or sizing the JVM appropriately are important for enhancing performance, it is equally important to look at how to tune accesses to the backend database. After all, response time for a web request is dependent on the processing time in the Java application tier as well as the query processing time in the database tier.

While application performance monitoring can provide us with metrics on software use and delays, SolarWinds® Database Performance Monitor (DPM) was built to tell us stories as to why user behavior is the way it is in the database. Database performance monitoring for developers in the distributed cloud industry is an important practice for maintaining the best environment for your users.

Imagine some users complaining that querying PostgreSQL is slow (this never happened right?), and we have to troubleshoot this problem. It could be one of two things: I would normally first check on the environment, specifically PostgreSQL metrics over time. Such monitoring shows if the CPU is too high or how many disk reads were buffer reads. PostgreSQL logs also give information about the environment, such as how many statements were run and if any errors occurred.

Evolving MySQL operations requires understanding how MySQL works. A good monitoring tool alerts on issues before they impact end users and helps reduce the MTTR of incidents when they do occur. But choosing a database monitoring solution can be tough due to the vast number of solutions available, each with their own pros and cons. In this blog post, I’ll review some of the best MySQL monitoring tools available that can help measure and improve database performance.