PMM Dump: A New Tool to Support Percona Customers

In this post, I will present a new Percona tool: PMM Dump. The PMM Dump performs a logical backup of the performance metrics collected by the Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) Server and imports them into a different PMM Server instance. PMM Dump allows you to share monitoring data collected by your PMM server securely with the Percona Support team. First General Availability version of PMM Dump was released on November 22, 2023.

In Percona Support, we help our customers to resolve performance issues. In order to do it, we need to see performance metrics collected at the time when the issue happens. PMM collects the metrics we need, and if a customer can provide us access to their PMM instance, we can start resolving the issue right away.

Unfortunately, not everyone who uses PMM can provide us access due to their companies’ security restrictions. We also cannot effectively use  PMM snapshots because they require individual sharing of dashboards or panels. This requires a lot of manual work on both the customer’s and our sides.

To resolve this problem, we created a tool that allows customers to export performance and query analytics metrics into a dump file that we can later restore on our own secure, private, and temporary PMM instances and access the data as if it were collected by our own servers.

Once the issue is resolved and the corresponding ticket closed, we remove all data provided by customers. You can read more about Percona security and data privacy practices at https://www.percona.com/legal/percona-security-and-data-privacy-practices.

PMM Dump supports rich filtering options and native VictoriaMetrics or ClickHouse queries so users can decide which data they want to share with us.

PMM Dump is a command line tool that can be downloaded from https://www.percona.com/get/pmm-dump. Starting from PMM version 2.27.0, it is also shipped together with PMM. Unofficial ARM packages are available at https://github.com/Percona-Lab/percona-on-arm/releases.

By default, PMM Dump dumps all performance metrics collected in the last 4 hours:

It will not collect query analytics data by default. To do it, specify the option --dump-qan.

To specify a different time range, use options --start-ts  and --end-ts:

To dump only specific instances, use option --instance:

You can specify this option as many times as you need:

You can also filter by a dashboard:

On the Support side, we import the resulting dump using either the import command or load-pmm-dump helper script.

Once imported successfully, we can access the local PMM instance and start resolving performance issues for our customers.

For more information about PMM Dump and its rich filtering options, consult the user reference manual at https://docs.percona.com/pmm-dump-documentation/index.html.

Percona Monitoring and Management is a best-of-breed open source database monitoring solution. It helps you reduce complexity, optimize performance, and improve the security of your business-critical database environments, no matter where they are located or deployed.

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