Technical details

Here are some technical details that might be interesting for those who are planning to use pgwatch2 for critical monitoring tasks or customize it in some way.

• Dynamic management of monitored databases, metrics and their intervals - no need to restart/redeploy

  Config DB or YAML / SQL files are scanned every 2 minutes (by default, changeable via –servers-refresh-loop-seconds) and changes are applied dynamically. As common connectivity errors also also handled, there should be no need to restart the gatherer “for fun”. Please always report issues which require restarting.

• There are some safety features built-in so that monitoring would not obstruct actual operation of databases

  • Up to 2 concurrent queries per monitored database (thus more per cluster) are allowed
  • Configurable statement timeouts per DB
  • SSL connections support for safe over-the-internet monitoring (use “-e PW2_WEBSSL=1 -e PW2_GRAFANASSL=1” when launching Docker)
  • Optional authentication for the Web UI and Grafana (by default freely accessible)

• Instance-level metrics caching

  To further reduce load on multi-DB instances, pgwatch2 can cache the output of metrics that are marked to gather only instance-level data. One such metric is for example “wal”, and the metric attribute is “is_instance_level”. Caching will by activated only for continuous DB types, and to a default limit of up to 30 seconds (changeable via the –instance-level-cache-max-seconds param).