Monitoring and Observability

Tungsten Clustering is a powerful tool with many moving parts, including the Tungsten Connectors which may be installed on any application server. During a troubleshooting event, it is helpful to understand what to look for and where, in addition to understanding how the logs work together to provide a clear picture of the situation. In Tungsten version 7, we introduced a number of features designed to make troubleshooting easier, and this blog will cover some of that too.

This blog post will walk you through configuring HA Proxy for the Tungsten Dashboard, along with the new command `tpm generate-haproxy-for-api` which helps automate the process by translating existing INI files into haproxy.cfg config file format. The Tungsten Dashboard is a browser-based GUI, designed to make using a Tungsten Cluster as easy as possible.

We are pleased to announce that Tungsten Clustering and Tungsten Replicator GA versions 7.0.1 are now available. This new minor release includes 52 new features and improvements, including two critical bug fixes. Read this blog to learn about the new v7.0.1 release!

Sometimes you really, really want to know what a MySQL client is asking of the MySQL server. As of Tungsten Clustering v7.0.0, you may now enable Connector Audit Logging, which captures data transferred between client applications and MySQL servers to a file, database or socket. This blog post will walk you through the feature and how to enable, configure and disable Tungsten Connector Audit Logging.

In this post we will explore a new command in v7.0.1, tpm report. The purpose of tpm report is to provide easy access to all of the settings that pertain to a specific topic. Since Security is a high priority at Continuent, the current default (and only) topic is the Security stance. The tpm report command will evolve and grow over time. This first version is Continuent’s way of providing as much transparency about Tungsten Cluster Security as possible.

In our last blog post on this topic we covered the basics of the new REST  API available with Tungsten version 7.0.0. In this post, Part 2, we explore the REST API in more detail, including payloads and advanced functionality. The API provides a vast pool of capabilities, and here we barely scratch the surface of what can be accomplished.

We are pleased to announce that Tungsten Clustering and Tungsten Replicator GA versions 7.0 are now available. This new major release includes the Tungsten RESTful API (API v2.0), enhanced security, monitoring, performance, management, new commands, a new and improved Dashboard, and new Dynamic Active/Active (DAA) topology. Tungsten v7.0 is the culmination of years of planning and work, and it lays the foundation for even more pinnacle developments. Read this blog to learn about the new v7 release!

The tungsten_merge_logs command is designed to aid troubleshooting by consolidating the various log files into one place (merged.log), ordered by time. There are many moving parts to a cluster and they are spread over multiple nodes (usually three). When there is an issue, the logs are the key resource to find out what is going on. The best practice is to gather the log files into one place and then read through them all. This can be difficult with many files on multiple nodes. For this reason, the `tungsten_merge_logs` tool was created.

In this blog post we will explore the procedure for getting an email notification every time a file is uploaded to an AWS S3 bucket. Instead of having to poll the AWS S3 bucket manually for new uploads, we wanted a way to be notified by email every time a file landed. The solution was a combination of an SNS Topic used by an SNS Subscription, and called by an S3 bucket Event notification.

Standards allow modern systems to advance, and the REST specification is one very important example. 

Since this post is about the Tungsten API in specific, let me simply say this - a RESTful API adheres to six principles: Client-server, stateless, cacheable, uniform interface, layered system and optionally code on demand. As part of the watchability/monitoring goal, our upcoming version 7.0.0 includes a proper RESTful API - what we call APIv2. This API will be fully documented and public.

Prometheus is one of the more popular ways to monitor your resources, and starting with version 7.0.0, Continuent has embedded the Prometheus exporter functionality into our core MySQL and MariaDB clustering products. This blog post covers how to enable the exporters, getting metrics and what metrics are available, along with cli tools, customizing the config, documentation references and a little bit about Grafana Dashboard for Tungsten Clusters.

Continuent provides multiple methods out of the box to monitor the cluster health. It integrates with monitoring and alerting tools like Nagios/NRPE, Zabbix, and Pagerduty. This blog post shows you the thinking behind each included Tungsten Cluster monitoring tool, and when to use which tool.