10 Best MySQL Monitoring Tools in 2024

MySQL is one of the most used database technology among developers, and it is no surprise. Its success could be possibly traced to unique features, a highly scalable environment, and reliability. MySQL represents an essential feature in many applications, no matter the platform, and its emphasis was always on speed and performance.

MySQL can be now acquired in two different distributions - MySQL community edition that is available for free, and MySQL Enterprise edition.

MySQL offers essential features like:

• flexible architecture (open-source, multi-threaded, pluggable storage engine)
• high availability and replication (built-in replication engines, global transactions IDs, and more.)
• OLTP and transactions (ACID compliance, referential integrity, row-level locking)

Top 6 Tools and software for MySQL database monitoring

We've hopefully proved that database monitoring is essential for any progress, now let's take a look at the best MySQL monitoring solutions in 2023.

1. Better Stack

Better Stack allows you to query your logs the same way, you'd query your database with SQL-compatible structured log management. Better Stack collects data from a MySQL database using Vector. By offering integrations into stacks like Kubernetes, Heroku, Logstash, Rails, Docker, or AWS, and more, you get a broad array of options for monitoring.

Better Stack stands on custom-built technology and ClickHouse. Thanks to that, you can work with your logs more efficiently and save funds. Better Stack allows you to search & filter petabytes of logs in a moment and set an anomaly detection alert, to receive alerts when your logs become out of ordinary. The live tail feature allows you to overview your logs in real-time. All the collected data are connected to Grafana for comprehensive visualization and even more efficient intel management.

Tighter security is one of the benefits of log monitoring, and Better Stack itself is one of the most secure tools available. Using industry-standard best practices and cooperating only with data centers compliant with DIN ISO/IEC27001 certifications your data is safe during both transit and storage.

If you need a log monitoring solution for your hobby project, Better Stack is available for free. Without a credit card, you get access to 1 GB of storage a month, with 3-day data retention. The rest of the pricing is tier-based and starts at $24/month.

Main Benefits of Better Stack:

• more efficient ClickHouse based storage
• Variety of integrations available
• Thanks to integration with Better Stack Uptime, you can obtain a complete infrastructure monitoring and incident management solution

2. SolarWinds Papertrail

Papertrail allows you to collate text log files from multiple sources and visualize them in one place. Papertrail's dashboard organizes and visualizes application logs, text log data, and syslog. Papertrail allows you to aggregate logs from MySQL, including slow queries and error messages. This is possible thanks to a tiny-standalone deamon called remote_syslog2 and later MySQL versions can use its native Syslog support.

Logs are scanned for any anomalies or deviations and if needed real-time alerts and summaries are displayed. With the ability to create per-user access control protocols you do not compromise consistency or data security and integrity by giving access to multiple team members.

Papertrail offers a long-lasting and available, detailed view of your archives. They are stored in the .tsv format, which helps with the compression. Papertrail can show duplicate or similar messages, download archives through API key, or retrieve multiple archives on one requirement.

Papertrail is available for free and offers a 48 hours search window, 7 days archive, and a starting 16GB of data, which are then followed by a 50MB quota. The rest of the pricing depends on the data volume you need and the search window.

Main benefits of Papertrail:

• APM tools
• heartbeats monitor

3. Sematext

Sematext offers Real-Time visibility into MySQL instances and allows you to track metrics such as used memory, cache usage, table and user commands, rollbacks, handler operations, connections, threads, and more. Sematext is built upon the ELK-stack and allows you to trace code execution from any back-end service and database, which allows you to gain key insights into your software.

Sematext is built for a seamless start, thanks to Sematext Agent, and is supported across multiple environments including Docker, Kubernetes, or Docker.

Using Pre-Built Dashboards, you can visualize data, add or remove components, add a new report page with your business-essential metrics and correlate data to shorten the time needed for troubleshooting. Thanks to single view and split-screen, you can compare and correlate any two reports, which helps effectiveness.

Anomaly or threshold alerts are handled by third-party integrations such as Slack, Webhooks, OpsGenie, or Pagerduty.

Sematext logs is available for free and offers 500MB/day of data and 7 days retention. Premium subscription depends on the retention period, the daily volume of data needed, and the number of features you require, so it's a combination of the pay-as-you-go model and the tier-based model.

Main benefits of Sematext:

• per-app pricing
• Kibana integration

4. Datadog

Datadog allows you to unify metrics, traces, logs, and events from more than 450 technologies. You can basically log without limits, ingest everything and then decide what to index with filters. Live Tail ensures you get real-time insights and activation is taken care of centrally, so you leave nothing behind on the servers. Datadog is an intuitive platform, that allows you to correlate individual logs and discover patterns, then visualize them on customizable, drag-and-drop dashboards. Logs querying can be done without the knowledge of any query language. Datadog's alerts are powered by machine learning that automatically detects anomalies and log errors.

Datadog collects data using its agent and collects more than 60 standard metrics from the modern versions of MySQL. Data is then collected and visualized in a MySQL dashboard in Datadog. Datadog Database Monitoring allows you to get query-level metrics, that can be sorted based on key statistics, such as the number of executions, average execution time, and more, helping you to discover any inefficiencies or errors.

Using Datadog APM, you can trace requests as they propagate across services and infrastructure and generate statistics based on this data. Using Log explorer you can search through and filter logs, based on a specific service, investigate patterns or spot trends, that influence your software's performance.

Datadog does not offer a free subscription plan, however, you can try it out within a free trial period. Database monitoring starts at $70/month.

Main benefits of Datadog:

• No deep coding skills needed
• Unlimited user accounts

5. PRTG

PRTG allows you to monitor Oracle, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL, and MySQL environments, which makes PRTG a suitable solution for a complex database environment. Thanks to the flexible and customizable dashboards you are always on top of the situation and have an overview of notifications, alarms, logs, and more.

PRTG is relatively easy to set up, however has a rather difficult learning curve when it comes to benefiting from all of its features. Preconfigured sensors and APIs for admins can help to flatten this curve but the issue remains.

PRTG allows you to see execution times of requests, starting from connection buildup, via query execution, all the way to transaction handling, and disconnection times, and use this data, to tweak issues such as high latency. PRTG tries to minimize query and return times, which results in a live view of MySQL databases' performance.

You can try PRTG for 30 days in a free trial, and then continue with a free, heavily limited version, or buy a license that starts at around $1300/server.

Main benefits of PRTG:

• Enterprise-ready, complex tool
• In-depth reporting

6. MySQL Enterprise Monitor

MySQL Enterprise monitor allows you to, as the name suggests, monitor your SQL databases with software coming straight from the same toolshed - Oracle. MySQL enterprise monitor, or the MEM, offers a zero-configuration, agent-less monitoring, since the Query Analysis works out of the box, thanks to MySQL Performance Schema. Performance is monitored in real-time and can be tweaked, based on live performance metrics and trends.

MEM allows for a visual query analysis using MySQL Performance Schema. You can drill down into detailed query information and pinpoint code, that causes errors, take way too much time, use the most resources, or generate a high load.

MEM also covers Disk monitoring, OS monitoring, Security Monitoring, covering the MySQL enterprise firewall and audit, or backup monitoring.

However, MEM is really expensive, even more for a tool coming straight from the developers. Their visually outdated and overwhelming websites, outdated documentation, and often troublesome support make it even harder to voluntarily spend thousands of dollars a year.

Main benefits of MySQL Enterprise Monitor:

• Complex MySQL Monitoring solution, coming straight from the developers

MySQL database metrics to monitor:

• Response Time - This metric represents the average response time per query. You want to monitor the total number of requests your database receives and how long it takes to process each. Understanding this metric is important for increasing overall database performance and helps you focus on what causes the delay for applications.
• Query Performance - Every out-of-the-ordinary query helps you understand your database better. Queries that take too long to identify the necessary data slow down the whole chain, for example, application logins. This negatively influences the performance of your database but also your end user. This can help to speed up individual queries, but also lower their cost.
• Database Events - Database events enable an application or the DBMS Server to notify other applications that a specific event has occurred. Event is anything, that your software is supposed to handle by design - DELETE, INSERT, UPDATE in case of the DML events, CREATE, ALTER, DROP in case of DDL Events or Database events like SERVERERROR, LOGON/OFF, STARTUP/SHUTDOWN. Monitoring these events, and spotting complex overuse of complex triggers on frequently modified tables can significantly influence performance.
• Query Throughput - This is the rating of the data warehouse and is defined by the speed of implementing queries. You obtain this data by calculating the amount of work a database performs under normal circumstances. For example, you can look for queries, or transactions per second, replication latency, or queries waiting for disk IO per second. Analysis of obtained data consists of making sure if work is being done as it should. In MySQL, the function of the database is to run queries, so monitoring should show you if queries are executed as expected, and if not, track the issue from here.
• Open Connections - These network connections facilitate communication between end-users software and your database. These connections are essential for sending commands and receiving responses, accessing database data sources, reading data from tables, or performing SQL queries, and more. Monitoring this metric helps you save funds in case you have too many database connections open, or if your database receives excessive connection requests.
• Errors - Database connection errors can cause downtime for your entire site and mostly occur when the PHP code failed to access your MySQL database. In this case, log monitoring is key for resolving and preventing occurring issues.
• Buffer Pool Usage - Buffer pool utilizes as much memory as it is allocated and in case it fills up, it eliminates older and less used data. For example, while monitoring read-ahead requests you can find out that it slows down your database. This can be prevented by saving the disk I/O if the data you need to read in the future is on the page. A well-performing Buffer pool is essential for overall database performance because buffer cache stores information in kernel memory, but if important data is dumped, it needs to be re-read from disk, this causes slowness that hurts overall performance.
• Resource utilization - Monitoring max connections, disk capacity, replica lag, input/output times, and hardware, is standard monitoring practice.

Following and analyzing these metrics will help you understand how to scale your database in the future. Running out of resources for your database could have catastrophic consequences, that's why you need to accurately predict how much memory, CPU and disk will your database require in order to prevent either Underutilization or on the other side lack of resources, or Overutilization.

Conclusion

In this article, we introduced MySQL, its key features and the best tools for MySQL databases monitoring in 2023. At the very end we’ve shown you some of the metrics you should not forget about when monitoring your Database.