I’m really proud to announce the release of the version 1.0 of mysql-snmp.

What is mysql-snmp?

mysql-snmp is a mix between the excellent MySQL Cacti Templates and a Net-SNMP agent. The idea is that combining the power of the MySQL Cacti Templates and any SNMP based monitoring would unleash a powerful mysql monitoring system. Of course this project favorite monitoring system is OpenNMS.

mysql-snmp is shipped with the necessary OpenNMS configuration files, but any other SNMP monitoring software can be used (provided you configure it).

To get there, you need to run a SNMP agent on each MySQL server, along with mysql-snmp. Then OpenNMS (or any SNMP monitoring software) will contact it and fetch the various values.

Mysql-snmp exposes a lot of useful values including but not limited to:

• SHOW STATUS values
• SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS parsed values (MySQL 5.0, 5.1, XtraDB or Innodb plugin are supported)

Here are some graph examples produced with OpenNMS 1.6.5 and mysql-snmp 1.0 on one of Days of Wonder MySQL server (running a MySQL 5.0 Percona build):

This graph shows the number of SQL commands per unit of time

You can see the effect of MySQL bug #47991

Where to get it

mysql-snmp is available in my github repository. The repository contains a spec file to build a RPM and what is needed to build a Debian package. Refer to the README or the mysql-snmp page for more information.

Thanks to gihub, it is possible to download the tarball instead of using Git:

Mysql-snmp v1.0 tarball

Changelog

This lists all new features/options from the initial version v0.6:

• Spec file to build RPM
• Use of configuration file for storing mysql password
• Fix of slave handling
• Fix for mk-heartbeat slave lag
• Support of InnoDB plugin and Percona XtraDB
• Automated testing of InnoDB parsing
• Removed some false positive errors
• OpenNMS configuration generation from MySQL Cacti Templates core files
• 64 bits computation done in Perl instead of (ab)using MySQL
• More InnoDB values (memory, locked tables, …)

Reporting Issues

Please use Github issue system to report any issues.

Requirements

There is a little issue here. mysql-snmp uses Net-Snmp. Not all versions of Net-Snmp are supported as some older versions have some bug for dealing with Counter64. Version 5.4.2.1 with this patch is known to work fine.

Also note that this project uses some Counter64, so make sure you configure your SNMP monitoring software to use SNMP v2c or v3 (SNMP v1 doesn’t support 64 bits values).

Final words!

I wish everybody an happy new year. Consider this new version as my Christmas present to the community

Thanks to Days of Wonder the company I work for, I’m proud to release in Free Software (GPL):

mysql-snmp – monitor a MySQL server with SNMP

History

At Days of Wonder, we’re using MySQL for almost everything since the beginning of the company. We were initially monitoring all our infrastructure with mon and Cricket, including our MySQL servers. Nine months ago I migrated the monitoring infrastructure to OpenNMS, and at the same we lost the Cricket MySQL monitoring (which was done with direct SQL SHOW STATUS LIKE commands).

I had to find another way, and since OpenNMS excels at SNMP, it was natural to monitor MySQL through SNMP. My browsing crossed this blog post. At about the same time I noticed that Baron Schwartz had released some very good MySQL Cacti Templates, so I decided I should cross both project and started working on mysql-snmp on my free time.

Hopefully, Days of Wonder has an IANA SNMP enterprises sub-number (20267, we use this for monitoring our game servers), so the MIB I wrote for this project is hosted in a natural place in the MIB hierarchy.

What’s this?

It’s a Net-SNMP perl subagent that connects to your MySQL server, and reports various statistics (from show status or show innodb status, or even replication) through SNMP.

But wait, there’s more, there’s OpenNMS support!

If you followed this blog from the very start, you know we’re using OpenNMS to monitor Days of Wonder infrastructure. So I included the various OpenNMS configuration bit to display nice and usable graphs, inspired by the excellent MySQL Cacti Templates.

Here are some examples:

So, I want it! Where should I look?

The code is hosted in my github repository, and everything you should know is in the mysql-snmp page on my site.

If you use this software, please do not hesitate to contribute, and/or fix bugs

Since a few months we are monitoring our infrastructure at Days of Wonder with OpenNMS. Until this afternoon we were running the beta/final candidate version 1.5.93.

We are monitoring a few things with the JDBC Stored Procedure Poller, which is really great to monitor complex business operations without writing remote or GP scripts.

Unfortunately the migration to OpenNMS 1.6.1 led me to discover that the JDBC Stored Procedure poller was not working anymore, crashing with a NullPointerException in the MySQL JDBC Driver while trying to fetch the output parameter.

In fact it turned out I was plain wrong. I was using a MySQL PROCEDURE:

DELIMITER //
CREATE PROCEDURE `check_for_something`()
READS SQL DATA
BEGIN
SELECT ... as valid FROM ...
END //

But this OpenNMS poller uses the following JDBC procedure call:

{ ? = call check_for_something() }

After a few struggling, wrestling, and various MySQL JDBC Connector/J driver upgrades, I finally figured out what the driver was doing:

The driver rewrites the call I gave above to something like this:

SELECT check_for_something();

This means that the procedure should in fact be a SQL FUNCTION.

Here is the same procedure rewritten as a FUNCTION:

DELIMITER //
CREATE FUNCTION `check_for_something`()
RETURNS int(11)
READS SQL DATA
DETERMINISTIC
BEGIN
DECLARE valid INTEGER;
SELECT ... INTO valid FROM ...
RETURN valid;
END //

It now works. I’m amazed it even worked in the first time with 1.5.93 (it was for sure).