Prometheus Mysql Exporter

Prometheus exporter for MySQL server metrics. This chart bootstraps a Prometheus mysql exporter deployment on a Kubernetes cluster using the Helm package manager. The exporter can connect to mysql directly or using the Cloud SQL Proxy.

Supported MySQL versions: 5.5 and up.

NOTE: Not all collection methods are supported on MySQL < 5.6

Monitoring MySQLd with Prometheus

The Prometheus ecosystem contains a multitude of integrations, both officially supported and third party. Let's have a look at how to use the mysqld_exporter.

MySQL is a popular database system, which exposes a wide variety of metrics but not in a format Prometheus can directly consume. The mysqld_exporter bridges this gap.

I'm going to assume you already have a working MySQLd installed. We first need to create a user that can connect locally with appropriate permissions:

CREATE USER 'mysqld_exporter'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'a_password';
GRANT PROCESS, REPLICATION CLIENT, SELECT ON *.* TO 'mysqld_exporter'@'localhost'
WITH MAX_USER_CONNECTIONS 3;

Then download and run the mysqld_exporter:

wget https://github.com/prometheus/mysqld_exporter/releases/download/v0.9.0/mysqld_exporter-0.9.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar -xzf mysqld_exporter-0.9.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz
export DATA_SOURCE_NAME='mysqld_exporter:a_password@unix(/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock)/'
./mysqld_exporter
You may need to adjust the location of the Unix socket.

If you visit http://localhost:9104/metrics you'll see your metrics!

Let's setup a Prometheus to scrape the exporter:

wget https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/download/v2.0.0/prometheus-2.0.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar -xzf prometheus-2.0.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz
cd prometheus-*
cat <<'EOF' > prometheus.yml
global:
scrape_interval: 10s
evaluation_interval: 10s
scrape_configs:
- job_name: 'mysqld'
static_configs:
- targets:
- localhost:9104
EOF
./prometheus &

From there you can go to http://localhost:9090/graph and plot expressions such as irate(mysql_global_status_queries[1m]) to get the query rate.

The mysqld_exporter can provide a wide wealth of information, however, for performance reasons most of this is disabled by default. The official docs have the flags you can use to enable more metrics.