My Journey into Postgres Monitoring with Lukas Fittl & Rob Treat | Path To Citus Con Ep10

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?
* Path To Citus Con has been renamed to Talking Postgres. All of the past podcast episodes can be found here: talkingpostgres.com
Guests Lukas Fittl and Rob Treat:
Lukas Fittl is a serial entrepreneur and founder of pganalyze, where he empowers developers at companies like Atlassian and DoorDash to do their best work with a powerful product that enables them to deliver consistent Postgres performance and availability through intelligent tuning advisors and continuous database profiling.
Rob Treat is a former scalability practitioner and devopsdays organizer-his consulting clients included Etsy, Gilt, Doordash, National Geographic, 3/5 of FAANG, several monitoring companies, and many more. He is currently semi-retired but enjoys helping people with Postgres.
Co-hosted by Claire Giordano and Pino de Candia:
Claire Giordano is head of the Postgres and Citus open source community initiatives at Microsoft. Prior to the Microsoft acquisition of Citus Data, Claire served in leadership roles in engineering, product management, and product marketing at Sun Microsystems, Amazon/A9, and Citus Data. At Sun, Claire managed the engineering team that created Solaris Zones, and led the effort to open source Solaris.
Pino de Candia is a software dev manager at Microsoft since 2020 and is currently working on the Citus open source project. Pino previously worked on the managed PostgreSQL database service in Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL, which includes Citus on Azure support for distributed PostgreSQL. Pino has lived in New Orleans since 2017.
Chapters:
⏩ 00:00 Intro & origin of pganalyze
⏩ 6:56 Circonus and monitoring
⏩ 15:10 Monitoring vs. observability
⏩ 21:12 Monitoring is for known unknowns?
⏩ 24:31 Slow queries: major pain point
⏩ 30.23 How should people think about monitoring?
⏩ 31:52 Top 5 monitoring tools
⏩ 52:17 pg_stat_io on Postgres16
⏩ 1:01:07 Cloud vs. on-prem monitoring
⏩ 1:07:05 Is AI going to monitor everything?
⏩ 1:13:31 Defining pg_hint_plan
⏩ 1:16:40 Postgres mailing lists
📜 Full transcript of this podcast episode available at:
pathtocituscon.transistor.fm/...
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Links mentioned in this episode:
🔹OpenTelemetry: opentelemetry.io/
🔹pganalyze: pganalyze.com/
🔹pgDash: pgdash.io/
🔹pgMustard: www.pgmustard.com/
🔹pg_stat_statements docs: www.postgresql.org/docs/curre...
🔹pg_hint_plan: github.com/ossc-db/pg_hint_plan
🔹pg_hint_plan hint list: github.com/ossc-db/pg_hint_pl...
🔹Example for PostgreSQL with pg_hint_plan: api.rubyonrails.org/classes/A...
🔹5mins of Postgres by pganalyze: • 5mins of Postgres
🔹Monitoring page on PostgreSQL wiki: wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Moni...
🔹PgHero GitHub repo: github.com/ankane/pghero
🔹Insights on pgBadger: A PGSQL Phriday #010 Recap: techcommunity.microsoft.com/t...
🔹Get PostgreSQL Logs Into Honeycomb: docs.honeycomb.io/getting-dat...
🔹Blog post by Lukas Fittl about pg_stat_io by Lukas: pganalyze.com/blog/pg-stat-io\
🔹Blog post by Andrew Atkinson about pg_stat_io: andyatkinson.com/blog/2023/11...
🔹BPFtrace by iovisor GitHub repo: github.com/iovisor/bpftrace
🔹Trace PostgreSQL locks with pg_lock_tracer: jnidzwetzki.github.io/2023/01...
🔹sysdig by draios GitHub repo: github.com/draios/sysdig
🔹Using BPFtrace to trace PostgreSQL vacuum operations: www.timescale.com/blog/using-...
🔹PostgreSQL Mailing Lists: www.postgresql.org/list/
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