There are two axes of database monitoring. One axis is immediate insight. You can see what is happening right now, getting just-in-time visibility to solve problems and observe production behavior as it happens. The other axis is historical monitoring. This provides long-term persistence and reporting on the most important metrics over time, helping you make better decisions and understand trends.
With Heroku Postgres, you can get immediate insight with the pg-extras CLI plugin. Furthermore, we provide key metrics about your database right in your logs already for all applications.
For storage and reporting of your most important metrics, you can quickly set up rich historical reporting with Librato, which is available in our Add-ons marketplace. In this post, we walk through how to get started with Heroku Postgres monitoring for immediate visibility and long-term insight.
A healthy value for your cache hit will be as close to 100% as possible
It Starts with Logs
Heroku automatically collates and routes logs from every part of your app into a single channel, providing truly comprehensive, extensible, app-centric logging. With production Postgres databases on Heroku, robust logs and key metrics from your persistence level are routed directly into this stream. Key data including table-cache-hit, db_size, active-connections and more, outputting directly into your Heroku logs periodically. You can get immediate visibility into this stream by combining tail with a filter argument:
$ heroku logs --tail --ps heroku-postgres
Even better than viewing these logs manually is you can configure a log drain to be able to send your logs elsewhere. Fortunately when taking advantage of some of our add-ons they can automatically consume these logs without having to configure anything else.
Getting started with Librato
Librato is one such add-on that consumes your Heroku logs and gives you the ability to monitor on historical trends and set up alerts. You can get started with it right away by provisioning the add-on:
$ heroku addons:add librato
Librato will now be automatically consuming data from your Heroku logs and you can simply open it up to get immediate visibility into your Heroku Postgres cache hit, database connections, and insight around request queueing. If you have log runtime metrics already enabled on your application then you’ll see those insights as well.
Going further
While the initial dashboard is already helpful, you can gain additional insights by adding your own instruments to your dashboard. And if you need data thats not already available in your Heroku log stream you can add custom data yourself.