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PMM is your best choice when looking for an Open Source monitoring solution
October 22, 2020

PMM is your best choice when looking for an Open Source monitoring solution

Miklos Szel | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM)

We monitor hundreds of database servers (MySQL) with PMM and we has been actively using it on prod since the first betas. It's extremely helpful, easy to deploy and it makes possible for the whole OPS team to check the status of the DB layer. The Query Analyzer is the only Open Source query visualization tool that is being developed and it's also useful when hunting for problematic/resource intensive queries.
  • Easy to deploy.
  • Easy to use.
  • Nice interface.
  • Setting up alerts is still complicated.
  • Automatic dashboards based on ec2 tags.
  • Better scaling for larger deployment.
  • We can identify issues way better.
  • We can identify blocking queries faster.
  • We can run it fully on-premises.
  • SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor (formerly VividCortex)
VividCortex is really excellent when it comes to query analysis, but it's pricy and on-premises sample collection is more problematic. When you have hundreds of machines and you even need to store the monitoring metadata locally, PMM is an excellent choice. If you are mainly interested in query analysis and on-premises hosting is not a requirement, VividCortex probably worth a look too.
Percona has a history of being good at providing really informative materials in form of blog post, documentation, webinars or conference presentations. T is also true to the Percona Monitoring and Management, you can find excellent source of information on their site or on the forum. Support tickets are also handled well.
I really like Grafana (the frontend of the PMM), but there are some minor things that sometimes don't click. For example the main dashboard lists all machines automatically, this page can be really slow when you have many instances(one can change the default landing page though). Sometimes the interface is not super responsive when making an overview for a lot of servers at once. Otherwise it's really well planned, logical and beautiful.

Do you think Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM)'s feature set?

Yes

Did Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) again?

Yes

MySQL, SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor (formerly VividCortex), Percona Server for MySQL
There are no other open source tools out there that could compete with PMM in its league. If you use MySQL (or PostgreSQL, ProxySQL) you can have a running monitoring in a couple of minutes. The agents are not really resource intensive and Percona provides a repo for most of the main Linux distributions. The documentation is thorough and straightforward. The defaults are good!