5. Monitor database with Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM)¶

We recommend to monitor the database with Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) integrated within the Operator. You can also use custom monitoring solutions, but their deployment is not automated by the Operator and requires manual setup).

In this section you will learn how to monitor Percona XtraDB Cluster with PMM.

PMM is a client/server application. It consists of the PMM Server and a number of PMM Clients . PMM Clients run on each node with the database you wish to monitor. In Kubernetes, this means that PMM Clients run as sidecar containers for the database Pods.

A PMM Client collects needed metrics and sends the gathered data to the PMM Server. As a user, you connect to the PMM Server to see database metrics on a number of dashboards.

PMM Server and PMM Client are installed separately.

Install PMM Server¶

You must have PMM server up and running. You can run PMM Server as a Docker image, a virtual appliance, or on an AWS instance. Please refer to the official PMM documentation for the installation instructions.

Install PMM Client¶

Install PMM Client as a side-car container in your Kubernetes-based environment:

Authorize PMM Client within PMM Server.
Token-based authorization (recommended)Password-based authorization (deprecated since the Operator 1.11.0)
1. Generate the PMM Server API Key . Specify the Admin role when getting the API Key.

Warning: The API key is not rotated automatically.
1. Edit the deploy/secrets.yaml secrets file and specify the PMM API key for the pmmserverkey option.
2. Apply the configuration for the changes to take effect.
  
  $ kubectl apply -f deploy/secrets.yaml -n <namespace>
1. Check that the serverUser key in the deploy/cr.yaml file contains your PMM Server user name (admin by default), and make sure the pmmserver key in the deploy/secrets.yaml secrets file contains the password specified for the PMM Server during its installation
2. Apply the configuration for the changes to take effect.
  
  $ kubectl apply -f deploy/secrets.yaml -n <namespace>
Update the pmm section in the deploy/cr.yaml file:
- Set pmm.enabled=true.
- Specify your PMM Server hostname / an IP address for the pmm.serverHost option. The PMM Server IP address should be resolvable and reachable from within your cluster.
```
  pmm:
    enabled: true
    image: percona/pmm-client:2.44.0
    serverHost: monitoring-service
```

Apply the changes:

$ kubectl apply -f deploy/cr.yaml -n <namespace>

Check that corresponding Pods are not in a cycle of stopping and restarting. This cycle occurs if there are errors on the previous steps:
```
$ kubectl get pods -n <namespace>
$ kubectl logs  <cluster-name>-pxc-0 -c pmm-client -n <namespace>
```

Check the metrics¶

Let’s see how the collected data is visualized in PMM.

Now you can access PMM via https in a web browser, with the login/password authentication, and the browser is configured to show Percona XtraDB Cluster metrics.

Next steps¶

What’s next

Last update: 2025-07-28