Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Redhat Enterprise Linux 8 packages have been released into our repositories.  Recent versions of Percona Server for MySQL, Percona XtraDB Cluster, Percona XtraBackup,  Percona Server for MongoDB, Percona Toolkit, and the PMM Client can now be automatically installed via Redhats dnf utility.

How to install RHEL 8

Visit https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enterprise-linux and follow the instructions.  If you have a paid subscription,  you will be able to download the RHEL 8 DVD ISO and use this to install the operating system on a physical or virtual machine.   You may also signup for a free 30-day trial.

Once installed, you will need to register the instance with Redhat using subscription-manager in order to update your instance.   While logged in as a user with administrator privileges from shell prompt, issue the following commands:

$ sudo subscription-manager register
  (provide Red Hat account Username and Password)
$ sudo subscription-manager attach --auto
$ sudo dnf update

How to install Percona packages for RHEL 8

After you have started the RHEL 8 instance and registered it with Redhat,  you can install the percona-release package which will allow you to configure the correct repositories for the product you want to install.  

$ sudo dnf install https://repo.percona.com/yum/percona-release-latest.noarch.rpm

Installation instructions per product

Newer Percona products are separated into their own repositories in order to reduce dependency conflicts with other Percona software versions.  The percona-release script is used to configure the correct repositories for each product.

Percona Server 8.0.x

Percona Server 8.0.x is deployed into a separate repository.   Using the percona-release tool, set up the ps80 product.

Note:  Due to the modularity features built into RHEL 8’s dnf software package manager,  the mysql module must first be disabled before installing Percona Server 8.0.

$ sudo dnf module disable mysql
$ sudo percona-release setup ps80
$ sudo dnf install percona-server-server percona-server-client

If you want to install the MyRocks or TokuDB packages

$ sudo dnf install percona-server-rocksdb
$ sudo dnf install percona-server-tokudb

After installation you will need to start the server, and use the assigned temporary password to assign a new one:

$ sudo systemctl start mysqld
$ sudo grep 'temporary password' /var/log/mysqld.log
$ mysqladmin -uroot -p password

Percona Server 5.7.x

Percona Server 5.7.x is deployed into the “original” repository location.   

Note:  Due to the modularity features built into RHEL 8’s dnf software package manager,  the mysql module must first be disabled before installing Percona Server 8.0.

$ sudo dnf module disable mysql
$ sudo percona-release setup ps57
$ sudo dnf install Percona-Server-server-57 Percona-Server-client-57

If you want to install the MyRocks or TokuDB packages:

$ sudo dnf install Percona-Server-rocksdb-57
$ sudo dnf install Percona-Server-tokudb-57

After installation you will need to start the server, and use the assigned temporary password to assign a new one:

$ sudo systemctl start mysqld
$ sudo grep 'temporary password' /var/log/mysqld.log
$ mysqladmin -uroot -p password

Percona XtraBackup 8.0.x

Percona XtraBackup 8.0.x is deployed into a separate tools repository.   If you have configured the repository using the percona-release setup ps80 command no additional repository configuration is required.  If you are installing Percona XtraBackup 8.0 for use with MySQL Community 8.0 you will need to use the percona-release tool to enable the tools repository which contains XtraBackup,  Toolkit, the PMM Client and other dependencies.   If you have followed the instructions for Percona Server 8.0 above,  the tools repository is enabled.

Note:  Due to the modularity features built into RHEL 8’s dnf software package manager,  the mysql module must first be disabled before installing Percona Server 8.0.

To install and use with Percona Server 8.0

$ sudo dnf module disable mysql
$ sudo percona-release setup ps80
$ sudo dnf install percona-xtrabackup-80

To install and use with MySQL Community 8.0

$ sudo percona-release enable-only tools
$ sudo dnf install percona-xtrabackup-80

Percona XtraBackup 2.4.x

Percona XtraBackup 2.4.x is deployed into the “original” repository location.  This repository is enabled by default so no repository configuration is required.

$ sudo dnf install percona-xtrabackup-24

Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.x

Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.x is deployed into the “original” repository location.   This repository is enabled by default so no repository configuration is required.

Note:  Due to the modularity features built into RHEL 8’s dnf software package manager,  the mysql module must first be disabled before installing Percona Server 8.0.

$ sudo dnf module disable mysql
$ sudo percona-release setup pxc57
$ sudo dnf install Percona-XtraDB-Cluster-57

Percona Server for MongoDB 4.0.x

Percona Server for MongoDB 4.0.x is deployed into a separate repository.   Using the percona-release tool, set up the psmdb40 product repositories.

$ sudo percona-release setup psmdb40
$ sudo dnf install percona-server-mongodb

Percona Toolkit 3.0.x

Percona Toolkit 3.0.x is deployed into both the “original” repository location and the new tools location.  This allows Percona Toolkit to be easily used with different products. If you have set up one of the server products above,  Percona Toolkit 3.0.x will be available.

Note: There is a known issue with Percona Toolkit and RHEL8.  Percona Toolkit uses the RHEL8 perl-DBD-MySQL database driver which is linked against the MariaDB C Connector.  The version of this connector that ships with RHEL8 does not support MySQL 8.0 SHA-2 (SHA256) authentication. Therefore, trying to connect to a Percona Server 8.0 or MySQL Community 8.0 instance that has this authentication mode enabled will fail.   The SHA-2 authentication plugin is enabled by default.  However, at the time of this writing,  the MySQL Community 8.0 server that ships with RHEL8 disables this authentication plugin to workaround the incompatibility with the MariaDB C Connector.  Percona Server 8.0 does not disable SHA-2 by default.

$ sudo dnf install percona-toolkit

PMM Client 1.x

PMM Client 1.x  is deployed into both the “original” repository location and the new tools location.  This allows PMM Client to be easily used with different products. If you have enabled one of the server products above,  PMM Client will be available. This “original” repository is enabled by default so no repository configuration is required.    

$ sudo dnf install pmm-client

Foursquare just made its first acquisition. The location tech company has acquired Placed from Snap Inc. on the heels of a fresh $150 million investment led by The Raine Group. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Placed founder and CEO David Shim will become president of Foursquare.

Placed is the biggest competitor to Foursquare’s Attribution product, which allows brands to track the physical impact (foot traffic to store) of a digital campaign or ad. Up until now, Placed and Attribution by Foursquare combined have measured more than $3 billion in ad-to-store visits.

Placed launched in 2011 and raised $13.4 million (according to Crunchbase) before being acquired by Snap Inc. in 2017.

As part of the deal with Foursquare, the company’s Attribution product will henceforth be known as Placed powered by Foursquare. The acquisition also means that Placed powered by Foursquare will have more than 450 measureable media partners, including Twitter, Snap, Pandora and Waze. Moreover, more than 50% of the Fortune 100 are partnered with Placed or Foursquare.

It’s also worth noting that this latest investment of $150 million is the biggest financing round for Foursquare ever, and comes following a $33 million Series F last year.

Here’s what Foursquare CEO Jeff Glueck had to say about the financing in a prepared statement:

This is one of the largest investments ever in the location tech space. The investment will fund our acquisition and also capitalize us for our increased R&D and expansion plans, allowing us to focus on our mission to build the world’s most trusted, independent location technology platform.

That last bit, about an independent location technology platform, is important here. Foursquare is 10 years old and has transformed from a consumer-facing location check-in app — a game, really — into a location analytics and development platform.

Indeed, when Glueck paints his vision for the company, he lists five key areas of focus:

1. Developer Tools to build smarter apps and customer engagement, using geo-context;
2. Analytics, including consumer insights for planning;
3. Audiences, so businesses can reach the right consumer segments for their message;
4. Attribution, to test and learn which messages, segments and channels work best;
5. Consumer, where through our own apps and Foursquare Labs’ R&D efforts we showcase what’s possible and inspire developers via our innovations around contextual location.

You’ll notice that its consumer apps, Foursquare and Swarm, are at the bottom of the list. But that’s because Foursquare’s real technological and strategic advantage isn’t in building the best social platform. In fact, Glueck said that more than 90% of the company’s revenue came from the enterprise side of the business. Foursquare’s advantage is in the accuracy of its technology, as afforded by the decade of data that has come from Foursquare, Swarm and the users who have expressly verified their location.

The Pilgrim SDK fits into that top item on the list: developer tools. The Pilgrim SDK allows developers to embed location-smart experiences and notifications into their apps and services. But it also expands Foursquare’s access to data from beyond its own apps to the greater ecosystem, yielding the data it needs to power analytics tools for brands and publishers.

With this acquisition, Placed will be able to leverage Foursquare’s existing map of 105 million places of interest across 190 countries, as well as tap into the measured U.S. audience of more than 100 million monthly devices:

Foursquare and Placed share a similar philosophy of building against a truth set of real consumer responses. Getting real people to confirm the name of their location is the only way to know if your technology is accurate or not. Placed has leveraged over 135 million survey responses in its first-party Placed survey apps, all from consumers opted-in to its rewards app. Foursquare expands the truth set for machine learning exponentially by adding in our over 13 billion consumer confirmations.

The hope is that Foursquare is accurate enough to become the de facto location analytics and services company for measuring ad spend. With enough scale, that may allow the company to break into the walled gardens where most of that ad spend is going: Facebook and Google.

Of course, to win as the “world’s most trusted, independent location technology platform,” consumers have to trust the platform. After all, one’s location may be the most sensitive piece of data about them. Foursquare has taken steps to be clear about what its technology is capable of. In fact, at SXSW this year, Foursquare offered a limited run of a product called Hypertrending, which was essentially an anonymized view of real-time location data showing activity in the Austin area.

Here’s what executive chairman and co-founder Dennis Crowley had to say at the time:

We feel the general trend with internet and technology companies these days has been to keep giving users a more and more personalized (albeit opaquely personalized) view of the world, while the companies that create these feeds keep the broad “God View” to themselves. Hypertrending is one example of how we can take Foursquare’s aggregate view of the world and make it available to the users who make it what it is. This is what we mean when we talk about “transparency” – we want to be honest, in public, about what our technology can do, how it works, and the specific design decisions we made in creating it.

With regards to today’s acquisition of Placed, Jeff Glueck had this to say:

Both companies also share a commitment to privacy and consumers being in control. Our Foursquare credo of “data as a privilege” only deepens as our company expands. We believe location should only be shared when consumers can see real value and visible benefits driven by location. We remain dedicated to elevating the industry through respect for transparency, user control, and instituting layers of privacy safeguards.

This new financing brings Foursquare’s total funding to $390.4 million.

Let’s rewind a decade. It’s 2009. Vancouver, Canada.

Stewart Butterfield, known already for his part in building Flickr, a photo-sharing service acquired by Yahoo in 2005, decided to try his hand — again — at building a game. Flickr had been a failed attempt at a game called Game Neverending followed by a big pivot. This time, Butterfield would make it work.

To make his dreams a reality, he joined forces with Flickr’s original chief software architect Cal Henderson, as well as former Flickr employees Eric Costello and Serguei Mourachov, who like himself, had served some time at Yahoo after the acquisition. Together, they would build Tiny Speck, the company behind an artful, non-combat massively multiplayer online game.

Years later, Butterfield would pull off a pivot more massive than his last. Slack, born from the ashes of his fantastical game, would lead a shift toward online productivity tools that fundamentally change the way people work.

Glitch is born

In mid-2009, former TechCrunch reporter-turned-venture-capitalist M.G. Siegler wrote one of the first stories on Butterfield’s mysterious startup plans.

“So what is Tiny Speck all about?” Siegler wrote. “That is still not entirely clear. The word on the street has been that it’s some kind of new social gaming endeavor, but all they’ll say on the site is ‘we are working on something huge and fun and we need help.’”

Siegler would go on to invest in Slack as a general partner at GV, the venture capital arm of Alphabet .

“Clearly this is a creative project,” Siegler added. “It almost sounds like they’re making an animated movie. As awesome as that would be, with people like Henderson on board, you can bet there’s impressive engineering going on to turn this all into a game of some sort (if that is in fact what this is all about).”

After months of speculation, Tiny Speck unveiled its project: Glitch, an online game set inside the brains of 11 giants. It would be free with in-game purchases available and eventually, a paid subscription for power users.

Welcome to Percona Live 2019 keynotes, day two!

Day two of Percona Live 2019 looks to be as filled with great talks as day one. Today we started with presentations from Percona, Continuent, VividCortex, Oracle, and Alibaba. You can view the recording of today’s keynotes here.

Percona Welcome Back
Matt Yonkovit (Percona)

Matt Yonkovit, Percona CXO, welcomed everyone back to Percona Live Open Source Database Conference 2019 day two. He reminded everybody to rate your talks using the Percona Live App. People who rate five or more talks are eligible for a raffle prize!

The State of the Dolphin
Frédéric Descamps – Oracle

Where are we with MySQL 8.0 one year after GA? How was the journey and how the Community impacted the road map? During this session come to discover our new release way allowing us to be even more close to our users looking for performance, stability but also innovation.

Cloud Native Database – POLARDB
Jimmy Yang – Alibaba Inc

1. Alibaba Cloud soon releases the MySQL 8.0-compatible edition of POLARDB
2. The new POLARDB would support parallel query, provide excellent large query support
3. The new POLARDB improves on IO with PolarStore as well as on various subsystems,
outperforms MySQL8.0 even on a standalone server.
4. More new features on with new POLARDB.

The Color of Open Source Money – Are some open source business models more acceptable than others?
Eero Teerikorpi – Continuent

The color of open source money is a curious case! There are those organizations that make money from open source technologies, with or without making contributions back to the software itself. There also are commercial open source software vendors, who do add value to the underlying open source technology by enhancing the solution and providing support for it. And then there are commercial software vendors who extend the capability of the open source solution with proprietary solutions. And, last but not least, some cloud providers’ business model involves building SaaS solutions based on free open source technology. Some of the above business models are deemed to be more acceptable by the open source community than others.

Bringing DevOps To The Database
Baron Schwartz – VividCortex

Applying DevOps principles and practices to the database can make software development processes faster, better and cheaper. Yet most companies do not include their databases in their DevOps initiatives because they face a variety of challenges to make it work.

Why is it hard to apply DevOps to databases? How can we get better at it? This talk addresses those questions (and more) by exploring the real-life stories of teams that successfully changed their entrenched culture, workflows, and tooling – and others who tried.

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM)
Michael Coburn – Percona

We are pleased to announce the release of PMM 2 Beta!  PMM (Percona Monitoring and Management) is a free and open-source platform for managing and monitoring MySQL, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL performance.

The Valley’s rocky history with clean tech investing has been well-documented.

Startups focused on non-emitting generation resources were once lauded as the next big cash cow, but the sector’s hype quickly got away from reality.

Complex underlying science, severe capital intensity, slow-moving customers, and high-cost business models outside the comfort zones of typical venture capital, ultimately caused a swath of venture-backed companies and investors in the clean tech boom to fall flat.

Yet, decarbonization and sustainability are issues that only seem to grow more dire and more galvanizing for founders and investors by the day, and more company builders are searching for new ways to promote environmental resilience.

While funding for clean tech startups can be hard to find nowadays, over time we’ve seen clean tech startups shift down the stack away from hardware-focused generation plays towards vertical-focused downstream software.

A far cry from past waves of venture-backed energy startups, the downstream clean tech companies offered more familiar technology with more familiar business models, geared towards more recognizable verticals and end users. Now, investors from less traditional clean tech backgrounds are coming out of the woodworks to take a swing at the energy space.

An emerging group of non-traditional investors getting involved in the clean energy space are those traditionally focused on fintech, such as New York and Europe based venture firm Anthemis — a financial services-focused team that recently sat down with our fintech contributor Gregg Schoenberg and I (check out the full meat of the conversation on Extra Crunch).

The tie between clean tech startups and fintech investors may seem tenuous at first thought. However, financial services has long played a significant role in the energy sector and is now becoming a more common end customer for energy startups focused on operations, management and analytics platforms, thus creating real opportunity for fintech investors to offer differentiated value.

Finance powering the world?

Though the conversation around energy resources and decarbonization often focuses on politics, a significant portion of decisions made in the energy generation business is driven by pure economics — Is it cheaper to run X resource relative to resources Y and Z at a given point in time? Based on bid prices for Request for Proposals (RFPs) in a specific market and the cost-competitiveness of certain resources, will a developer be able to hit their targeted rate of return if they build, buy or operate a certain type of generation asset?

Alternative generation sources like wind, solid oxide fuel cells, or large-scale or even rooftop solar have reached more competitive cost levels – in many parts of the US, wind and solar are in fact often the cheapest form of generation for power providers to run.

Thus as renewable resources have grown more cost competitive, more, infrastructure developers, and other new entrants have been emptying their wallets to buy up or build renewable assets like large scale solar or wind farms, with the American Council on Renewable Energy even forecasting cumulative private investment in renewable energy possibly reaching up to $1 trillion in the US by 2030.

A major and swelling set of renewable energy sources are now led by financial types looking for tools and platforms to better understand the operating and financial performance of their assets, in order to better maximize their return profile in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Therefore, fintech-focused venture firms with financial service pedigrees, like Anthemis, now find themselves in pole position when it comes to understanding clean tech startup customers, how they make purchase decisions, and what they’re looking for in a product.

In certain cases, fintech firms can even offer significant insight into shaping the efficacy of a product offering. For example, Anthemis portfolio company kWh Analytics provides a risk management and analytics platform for solar investors and operators that helps break down production, financial analysis, and portfolio performance.

For platforms like kWh analytics, fintech-focused firms can better understand the value proposition offered and help platforms understand how their technology can mechanically influence rates of return or otherwise.

The financial service customers for clean energy-related platforms extends past just private equity firms. Platforms have been and are being built around energy trading, renewable energy financing (think financing for rooftop solar) or the surrounding insurance market for assets.

When speaking with several of Anthemis’ clean tech portfolio companies, founders emphasized the value of having a fintech investor on board that not only knows the customer in these cases, but that also has a deep understanding of the broader financial ecosystem that surrounds energy assets.

Founders and firms seem to be realizing that various arms of financial services are playing growing roles when it comes to the development and access to clean energy resources.

By offering platforms and surrounding infrastructure that can improve the ease of operations for the growing number of finance-driven operators or can improve the actual financial performance of energy resources, companies can influence the fight for environmental sustainability by accelerating the development and adoption of cleaner resources.

Ultimately, a massive number of energy decisions are made by financial services firms and fintech firms may often times know the customers and products of downstream clean-tech startups more than most.  And while the financial services sector has often been labeled as dirty by some, the vital role it can play in the future of sustainable energy offers the industry a real chance to clean up its image.

It was all aboard the Lone Star river boat for the 100 delegates who joined our Community Dinner. Loading took quite some time, Tom Basil attended to the guest list, and then the necessary signatures for those aboard. I’d woken at 6 am to a less than favorable forecast, but the weather was kind to us, with blue sky and a gentle breeze.

My colleague and local Austin resident Rick Vasquez had on Tuesday treated me to my first visit to a US liquor store, Specs. This store was bigger than the largest store in my hometown but sold only alcohol-related products and drink-friendly snacks. An experience in itself! We stuck to the brief of Texas only brew for our guests.

As people boarded they received their swag – PlanetScale and Percona branded steel enamel mugs – and bar and dinner queues formed. The lines moved relatively quickly for the fajita and tex mex themed buffet. Most people seemed satisfied with the fare. Another relief… once we’re out on the water there’s no going back.

Loaded up in all respects, we set sail for a trip on Lady Bird Lake to see the Austin skyline and the hope of seeing the bats at dusk. Everyone seemed to be in great spirits and happy to spend some time out of the air con and in the relatively cool and fresh air of the lake.

Austin from all angles

It was good to see Austin from a new perspective, and of course there was lots of networking and chat. A few photos can be seen here but there are many more on the Facebook album.

The demand for the trip was significantly greater than the capacity of the boat. I’m truly sorry to anyone who could not get a seat because of space limitations. Next year… a bigger boat!

We are pleased to announce the release of PMM 2 Beta!  PMM (Percona Monitoring and Management) is a free and open-source platform for managing and monitoring MySQL, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL performance.

• Query Analytics:
  • MySQL and MongoDB – Slow log, PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA, and Profiler data sources
  • Support for large environments – default view all queries from all instances
  • Filtering – display only the results matching filters such as the schema name or the server instance
  • Sorting and more columns – now sort by any column.
  • Modify Columns – Add one or more columns for any field exposed by the data source
  • Sparklines –  restyled sparkline targeted at making data representation more accurate
• Labels – Prometheus now supports auto-discovered and custom labels
• Inventory Overview Dashboard – Displays the agents, services, and nodes which are registered with PMM Server
• Environment Overview Dashboard – See issues at a glance across multiple servers
• API – View versions and list hosts using the API
• MySQL, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL Metrics – Visualize database metrics over time
• pmm-agent – Provides secure remote management of the exporter processes and data collectors on the client

Query Analytics Dashboard

Query Analytics Dashboard now defaults to display all queries on each of the systems that are configured for MySQL PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA, Slow Log, and MongoDB Profiler, and includes comprehensive filtering capabilities.

Query Analytics Overview

You’ll recognize some of the common elements in PMM 2 Query Analytics such as the Load, Count, and Latency columns. However, there are new elements such as the filter box and more arrows on the columns:

Query Detail

Query Analytics continues to deliver detailed information regarding individual query performance

Filter and Search By

There is a filtering panel on the left, or use the search by bar to set filters using key:value syntax. For example, I’m interested in just the queries related to mysql-sl2 server, I could then type d_server:mysql-sl2:

Sort by any column

This is a much-requested feature from PMM Query Analytics and we’re glad to announce that you can now sort by any column! Just click the small arrow to the right of the column name and:

Sparklines

As you may have already noticed, we have changed the sparkline representation. New sparklines are not points-based lines, but are interval-based, and look like a staircase line with flat values for each of the displayed period:

We also position a single sparkline for only the left-most column and render numeric values for all remaining columns.

Add extra columns

Now you can add a column for each additional field which is exposed by the data source. For example, you can add Rows Examined by clicking the + sign and typing or selecting from the available list of fields:

MySQL Query Analytics Slow Log source

We’ve increased our MySQL support to include both PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA and Slow log – and if you’re using Percona Server with the Extended Slow Log format, you’ll be able to gain deep insight into the performance of individual queries, for example, InnoDB behavior.  Note the difference between the detail available from PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA vs Slow Log:

PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA:

Slow Log:

MongoDB Metrics

Support for MongoDB Metrics included in this release means you can add a local or remote MongoDB instance to PMM 2 and take advantage of the following view of MongoDB performance:

PostgreSQL Metrics

In this release, we’re also including support for PostgreSQL Metrics. We’re launching PMM 2 Beta with just the PostgreSQL Overview dashboard, but we have others under development, so watch for new Dashboards to appear in subsequent releases!

Environment Overview Dashboard

This new dashboard provides a bird’s-eye view, showing a large number of hosts at once. It allows you to easily figure out the hosts which have issues, and move onto other dashboards for a deeper investigation.

The charts presented show the top five hosts by different parameters:

The eye-catching colored hexagons with statistical data show the current values of parameters and allow you to drill-down to a dashboard which has further details on a specific host.

API

We are exposing an API for PMM Server! You can view versions, list hosts, and more…

The API is not guaranteed to work until GA release – so be prepared for some errors during Beta release.

Browse the API using Swagger at /swagger

Installation and configuration

The default PMM Server credentials are:

username: admin
password: admin

Install PMM Server with docker

The easiest way to install PMM Server is to deploy it with Docker. Running the PMM 2 Docker container with PMM Server can be done by the following commands (note the version tag of 2.0.0-beta1):

docker create -v /srv --name pmm-data-2-0-0-beta1 perconalab/pmm-server:2.0.0-beta1 /bin/true
docker run -d -p 80:80 -p 443:443 --volumes-from pmm-data-2-0-0-beta1 --name pmm-server-2.0.0-beta1 --restart always perconalab/pmm-server:2.0.0-beta1

Install PMM Client

Since PMM 2 is still not GA, you’ll need to leverage our experimental release of the Percona repository. You’ll need to download and install the official percona-release package from Percona, and use it to enable the Percona experimental component of the original repository. See percona-release official documentation for further details on this new tool.

Specific instructions for a Debian system are as follows:

wget https://repo.percona.com/apt/percona-release_latest.generic_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i percona-release_latest.generic_all.deb

Now enable the experimental repo:

sudo percona-release disable all
sudo percona-release enable original experimental

Install pmm2-client package:

apt-get update
apt-get install pmm2-client

Users who have previously installed pmm2-client alpha version should remove the package and install a new one in order to update to beta1.

Please note that leaving experimental repository enabled may affect further package installation operations with bleeding edge software that may not be suitable for Production. You can revert by disabling experimental via the following commands:

sudo percona-release disable original experimental
sudo apt-get update

Configure PMM

Once PMM Client is installed, run the pmm-admin config command with your PMM Server IP address to register your Node:

# pmm-admin config --server-insecure-tls --server-address=<IP Address>:443

You should see the following:

Checking local pmm-agent status...
pmm-agent is running.
Registering pmm-agent on PMM Server...
Registered.
Configuration file /usr/local/percona/pmm-agent.yaml updated.
Reloading pmm-agent configuration...
Configuration reloaded.

Adding MySQL Metrics and Query Analytics

MySQL server can be added for the monitoring in its normal way. Here is a command which adds it using the PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA source:

sudo pmm-admin add mysql --use-perfschema --username=pmm --password=pmm

where username and password are credentials for accessing MySQL.

The syntax to add MySQL services (Metrics and Query Analytics) using the Slow Log source is the following:

sudo pmm-admin add mysql --use-slowlog --username=pmm --password=pmm

When the server is added, you can check your MySQL dashboards and Query Analytics in order to view its performance information!

pmm-admin add mongodb --use-profiler --use-exporter  --username=pmm  --password=pmm

pmm-admin add postgresql --username=pmm --password=pmm

About PMM

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) is a free and open-source platform for managing and monitoring MySQL®, MongoDB®, and PostgreSQL® performance. You can run PMM in your own environment for maximum security and reliability. It provides thorough time-based analysis for MySQL®, MongoDB®, and PostgreSQL® servers to ensure that your data works as efficiently as possible.

Help us improve our software quality by reporting any Percona Monitoring and Management bugs you encounter using our bug tracking system.

It’s that time of year again, and we’ve just had the presentations of the MySQL Community Awards at Percona Live. A more fulsome blog post will be written for the Community Blog in the next few days about the worthy winners. Meanwhile, though, here’s a summary.

Committee Co-Secretaries Emily Slocombe of Square, and Agustin Gallego of Percona presented these annual community nominate awards today, In four categories, the awards went to:

• Community Contributor of the Year: Weixiang Zhai
• Community Contributor of the Year: Valerii Kravchuk

Both of the above awards were made for bug identification and submission. Valerii was represented by Vicentiu Ciorbaru of MariaDB Foundation who accepted the award on his behalf.

• The Application of the Year award was mad to Dbdeployer, for its incredible usefulness to the community of MySQL users. In this case, Giuseppe Maxia – the Data Charmer – could not attend the conference, so Oracle Community Manager LeFred donned a Dbdeployer shirt to accept the award on his behalf.

Last but not least, the Corporate Contributor of the Year was Tencent, and the award received by two representatives pictured here. In this case my journalistic abilities have let me down and I will update this post REALLY soon with the names of those accepting the award, but they are nevertheless pictured here.

Congratulations to all!

From left to right: Emily Slocombe, two representatives from Tencent (tbd), LeFred on behalf of Giuseppe Maxi, Vincentiu on behalf of Valerii, and Weixiang Zhai

Startups are often associated with the benefits and toys provided in their offices. Foosball tables! Free food! Dog friendly! But what if the future of startups was less about physical office space and more about remote-first work environments? What if, in fact, the most compelling aspect of a startup work environment is that the employees don’t have to go to one?

A remote-first company model has been Seeq’s strategy since our founding in 2013. We have raised $35 million and grown to more than 100 employees around the globe. Remote-first is clearly working for us and may be the best model for other software companies as well.

So, who is Seeq and what’s been the key to making the remote-first model work for us?  And why did we do it in the first place?

Seeq is a remote-first startup – i.e. it was founded with the intention of not having a physical headquarters or offices, and still operates that way – that is developing an advanced analytics application that enables process engineers and subject matter experts in oil & gas, pharmaceuticals, utilities, and other process manufacturing industries to investigate and publish insights from the massive amounts of sensor data they generate and store.

To succeed, we needed to build a team quickly with two skill sets: 1) software development expertise, including machine learning, AI, data visualization, open source, agile development processes, cloud, etc. and 2) deep domain expertise in the industries we target.

Which means there is no one location where we can hire all the employees we need: Silicon Valley for software, Houston for oil & gas, New Jersey for fine chemicals, Seattle for cloud expertise, water utilities across the country, and so forth. But being remote-first has made recruiting and hiring these high-demand roles easier much easier than if we were collocated.

Image via Seeq Corporation

Job postings on remote-specific web sites like FlexJobs, Remote.co and Remote OK typically draw hundreds of applicants in a matter of days. This enables Seeq to hire great employees who might not call Seattle, Houston or Silicon Valley home – and is particularly attractive to employees with location-dependent spouses or employees who simply want to work where they want to live.

But a remote-first strategy and hiring quality employees for the skills you need is not enough: succeeding as a remote-first company requires a plan and execution around the “3 C’s of remote-first”.

The three requirements to remote-first success are the three C’s: communication, commitment and culture.

Startups are often associated with the benefits and toys provided in their offices. Foosball tables! Free food! Dog friendly! But what if the future of startups was less about physical office space and more about remote-first work environments? What if, in fact, the most compelling aspect of a startup work environment is that the employees don’t have to go to one?

A remote-first company model has been Seeq’s strategy since our founding in 2013. We have raised $35 million and grown to more than 100 employees around the globe. Remote-first is clearly working for us and may be the best model for other software companies as well.

So, who is Seeq and what’s been the key to making the remote-first model work for us?  And why did we do it in the first place?

Seeq is a remote-first startup – i.e. it was founded with the intention of not having a physical headquarters or offices, and still operates that way – that is developing an advanced analytics application that enables process engineers and subject matter experts in oil & gas, pharmaceuticals, utilities, and other process manufacturing industries to investigate and publish insights from the massive amounts of sensor data they generate and store.

To succeed, we needed to build a team quickly with two skill sets: 1) software development expertise, including machine learning, AI, data visualization, open source, agile development processes, cloud, etc. and 2) deep domain expertise in the industries we target.

Which means there is no one location where we can hire all the employees we need: Silicon Valley for software, Houston for oil & gas, New Jersey for fine chemicals, Seattle for cloud expertise, water utilities across the country, and so forth. But being remote-first has made recruiting and hiring these high-demand roles easier much easier than if we were collocated.

Image via Seeq Corporation

Job postings on remote-specific web sites like FlexJobs, Remote.co and Remote OK typically draw hundreds of applicants in a matter of days. This enables Seeq to hire great employees who might not call Seattle, Houston or Silicon Valley home – and is particularly attractive to employees with location-dependent spouses or employees who simply want to work where they want to live.

But a remote-first strategy and hiring quality employees for the skills you need is not enough: succeeding as a remote-first company requires a plan and execution around the “3 C’s of remote-first”.

The three requirements to remote-first success are the three C’s: communication, commitment and culture.