MySQL Performance Security

Today, let’s talk about one of the biggest problems that a lot of organizations have with MySQL performance tuning, security and compliance posture.  

Since years I see the same kind of problems with MySQL performance issues that I have been solving, like: 

• Every 20-25 hours, all MySQL queries seem to be stuck for 1-2 minutes.  
• MySQL is consuming too much CPU and disk.  
• Replication slaves can’t keep up anymore.  
• This query shouldn’t be taking this long. It’s 10 times faster in dev. 
• Things were running fine for three months and suddenly performance slowed down, we’re not sure what to do. 
• Hundreds of other interesting challenges, each special in their own way. 

Let me ask you this important question?

How many of you : 

• Monitor their MySQL databases ? 
• Monitor performance metrics ? 
• Monitor security of their databases? 

Did you know ? 

Database monitoring is essential for two main reasons: performance and security of the database. 

Database monitoring should be important to you !

MySQL database monitoring is an important part of your organizations security and compliance posture. Knowing what to monitor, who should monitor it, and how often to set up alerts and scans is crucial for maintaining system health. Most importantly, implementing the right tools can save your organization a tremendous amount of time and agony, as well as help prevent potential breaches, performance issues and get answers to a lot of questions. 

How often do you have to monitor your MySQL Databases ? 

It depends how critical it is. If it’s a mission-critical system, you need to be on top of both performance and security issues at least daily. However, you can reduce your need to view the dashboard of your monitoring tool to a weekly check-in if you have alerts set up to inform you of critical issues in real-time. 

For both database security and database performance, real-time alerts are highly recommended for any critical databases. Real-time alerts ensure that you can take care of critical issues as soon as they occur. Real-time preventive measures ensure that your database is secure, even if you don’t take any immediate measures. 

What should you be monitoring? 

Every organization is different, but following the MySQL database check list that could point to performance and security. Here is the list: 

• 

  MySQL Performance Tuning Consulting

  Identification of all privileged users 

• Database performance and history tracking 
• Connections usage 
• Content of queries and responses of queries 
• Inactive users 
• Configuration changes (Security article) 
• Storage of the database monitoring and log information
• Top 10 query consumers of data 
• MySQL replicated cluster 
• Deadlock 
• Information on disk usage
  

Get information before the server runs out of resources. 

I have used in my MySQL DBA career many monitoring tools like for instance: MySQL Enterprise Monitor and MONyog monitoring tool and for me the best monitoring tool that is easy to use, configure and gives you all performance and security metrics that you need is MONyog   

But why MONyog? 

MONyog is the best out-of-the-box GUI monitoring tool for MySQL that I have seen so far. It “just works.” You can get it up and running quickly and having a centralized location for monitoring is very useful. The graphs are beautiful and the statistics that are graphed are useful time-savers. 

The biggest difference between MySQL Enterprise Monitor and MONyog is that MONyog is agentless. that agentless operation works for every feature, including log analysis as well as operating system statistics. 

Conclusion 

The biggest challenge for organizations is to identify the SQL statement that runs slow, get the information before the server runs out of resources and get alerts on time. 

The best advice I can give you is to get the right MySQL monitoring tool that will help you by advising you before a problem will occur, give you some advice based on real time metrics. 

In other words, having a monitoring tool that will advise you is as a “MYSQL TUNING EXPERT” in a box will help you sleep at night and also help you to tune your current MySQL servers and find and fix problems before they can become serious or costly outages.