Percona Telemetry Extension for PostgreSQL

Welcome to percona_pg_telemetry - extension for Percona telemetry data collection for PostgreSQL!

Overview

The extenions it be provided with the Percona distribution. The extension, at no point in time, collects, maintains, or sends any user personal/identifiable/sensitive data.

Configuration

You can find the configuration parameters of the percona_pg_telemetry extension in the pg_settings view by filtering name column with percona_pg_telemetry prefix. To change the default configuration, specify new values for the desired parameters using the GUC (Grand Unified Configuration) system. Alternatively, values may be changed by a superuser either at the server start time or via ALTER SYSTEM command followed SELECT pg_reload_conf(); statement.

Parameters

1. percona_pg_telemetry.enabled

• Default: true
• Unit: boolean
• When set to false, the leader process terminates when the configuration is read.

2. percona_pg_telemetry.path

• Default: /usr/local/percona/telemetry/pg

3. percona_pg_telemetry.scrape_interval

• Default: 86,400 (24 hours)
• Unit: s
• It is configured to wakeup the leader process every 24 hours by default. The leader may be woken up by a configuration reload interrupt or when the shutdown process is initiated.

4. percona_pg_telemetry.files_to_keep

• Default: 7
• Unit: Integer
• It forces the extension to maintain upto this number of files. Older files will get removed and new files will be created.

NOTE GUCs 3 - 4 are only visible if environment variable PT_DEBUG is set. This is prevent users in production environment to change these variables which are only for testing purposes.

Functions

1. percona_pg_telemetry_version()

• Outputs the version of the extension.

2. percona_pg_telemetry_status

• OUT: latest_output_filename - TEXT
  • Path of the JSON output file.
• OUT: pt_enabled - BOOLEAN
  • True if telemetry data collection is enabled.

Setup

You can enable percona_pg_telemetry when your postgresql instance is not running.

percona_pg_telemetry needs to be loaded at the start time. The extension requires additional shared memory; therefore, add the percona_pg_telemetry value for the shared_preload_libraries parameter and restart the postgresql instance.

Use the ALTER SYSTEM command from psql terminal to modify the shared_preload_libraries parameter.

ALTER SYSTEM SET shared_preload_libraries = 'percona_pg_telemetry';

NOTE: If you’ve added other modules to the shared_preload_libraries parameter (for example, pg_stat_monitor), list all of them separated by commas for the ALTER SYSTEM command.

Start or restart the postgresql instance to apply the changes.

Create the extension using the CREATE EXTENSION command. Using this command requires the privileges of a superuser or a database owner. Connect to psql as a superuser for a database and run the following command:

CREATE EXTENSION percona_pg_telemetry;

This allows you to see the stats collected by percona_pg_telemetry.

By default, percona_pg_telemetry is created for the postgres database. To access its functions in other databases, you need to create the extension for every required database.

Building from source

To build percona_pg_telemetry from source code, you require the following:

• git
• make
• gcc
• postgresql-devel | postgresql-server-dev-all

You can download the source code of the latest release of percona_pg_telemetry from the releases page on GitHub or using git:

git clone git://github.com/Percona-Lab/percona_pg_telemetry.git

Compile and install the extension

cd percona_pg_telemetry
make
make install

To run the associated regression tests, a make target is available. make installcheck is deliberately disabled as the preload configuration may not be set for installed servers.

make check

Uninstall percona_pg_telemetry

To uninstall percona_pg_telemetry, do the following:

1. Disable telemetry data collection. From the psql terminal or another similar client, run the following command:

   ALTER SYSTEM SET percona_pg_telemetry.enabled = 0;
   SELECT pg_reload_conf();

NOTE: This will cause the leader process to exit. To restart the leader process, ensure that percona_pg_telemetry.enabled = 1, and then restart the database server process.

2. Drop percona_pg_telemetry extension:

   DROP EXTENSION percona_pg_telemetry;

3. Remove percona_pg_telemetry from the shared_preload_libraries configuration parameter:

   ALTER SYSTEM SET shared_preload_libraries = '';

   Important: If the shared_preload_libraries parameter includes other modules, specify them all for the ALTER SYSTEM SET command to keep using them.

4. Restart the postgresql instance to apply the changes.