The Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) Amazon Machine Image (AMI) currently lacks native support for ENV variables. In this guide, we’ll walk through a straightforward workaround that simplifies the process of using ENV variables in PMM AMI and reapplying them after an upgrade.Step one: Adding ENV variables to /srv/.envBegin by consolidating your ENV variables in […]

In this blog post, we’ll look at three different methods for installing Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM).

Percona offers multiple methods of installing Percona Monitoring and Management, depending on your environment and scale. I’ll also share comments on which installation methods we’ve decided to forego for now. Let’s begin by reviewing the three supported methods:

1. Virtual Appliance
2. Amazon Machine Image
3. Docker

Virtual Appliance

We ship an OVF/OVA method to make installation as simple as possible, with the least amount of effort required and at the lowest cost to you. You can leverage the investment in your virtualization deployment platform. OVF is an open standard for packaging and distributing virtual appliances, designed to be run in virtual machines.

Using OVA with VirtualBox as a first step is common in order to quickly play with a working PMM system, and get right to adding clients and observing activity within your own environment against your MySQL and MongoDB instances. But you can also use the OVA file for enterprise deployments. It is a flexible file format that can be imported into other popular hypervisor systems such as VMware, Red Hat Virtualization, XenServer, Microsoft System Centre Virtual Machine Manager and others.

We’d love to hear your feedback on this installation method!

AWS AMI

We also have an AWS AMI in order to provide easy scaling of PMM Server in AWS, so that you can deploy onto any instance size required for your monitoring instance. Depending on the AWS region you’re in, you’ll need to choose from the appropriate AMI Instance ID. Soon we’ll be moving to the AWS Marketplace for even easier deployment. When this is implemented, you will no longer need to clone an existing AMI ID.

Docker

Docker is our most common production deployment method. It is easy (three commands) and scalable (tuning passed on the command line to Docker run). While we recognize that Docker is still a relatively new deployment system for many users, it is dramatically gaining adoption. It is also where Percona is investing the bulk of our development efforts. We deploy PMM Server as two Docker containers: one for storing the data that persists across restarts/upgrades, and the other for running the actual PMM Server binaries (Grafana, Prometheus, consul, Orchestrator, QAN, etc.).

Where are the RPM/DEB/tar.gz packages?!

A common question I hear is why doesn’t Percona support binary-based installation?

We hear you: RPM/DEB/tar.gz methods are commonly used today for many of your own applications. Percona is striving for simplicity in our deployment of PMM Server, and we spend considerable development and QA effort validating the specific versions of Grafana/Prometheus/QAN/consul/Orchestrator all work seamlessly together.

Percona wants to ensure OS compatibility and long-term support of PMM, and to do binary distribution “right” means it can quickly get expensive to build and QA across all the popular Linux distributions available today. We’re in no way against binary distributions. For example, see our list of the nine supported platforms for which we provide bug fix support.

Percona decided to focus our development efforts on stability and features, and less on the number of supported platforms. Hence the hyper-focus on Docker. We don’t have any current plans to move to a binary deployment method for PMM, but we are always open to hearing your feedback. If there is considerable interest, then please let me know via the comments below. We’ll take these thoughts into consideration for PMM planning in the second half of 2017.

Which other methods of installing Percona Monitoring and Management would you like to see?