Percona Monitoring and Management Server

My main use case for Percona Server  is to monitor applications and databases to show that applications are running and that they're working very well, and the alerts have been very good and useful.

I support a lot of applications, and a quick specific example of how I use Percona Server  to monitor my databases or applications is that it catches downtime and lagging activity on the servers and databases, and it could tell me what is wrong, so I deal with it before it becomes an issue.

That's what I use Percona Server for right now.

The best features that Percona Server offers include monitoring the nodes and databases, and giving me insight into the application, as I use MariaDB  and Postgres, and Percona Server is quite helpful to ensure that servers are running very well.

Percona Server has positively impacted my organization primarily by helping with uptime a lot, as I support a lot of applications and a lot of servers, and it ensures that our services are well monitored. Whenever there is an issue, Percona Server notifies us, and we resolve the issue immediately.

I can share specific outcomes or metrics; when I use Percona Server, issues on the network are reduced, and before I had Percona Server as monitoring, I noticed that customers had downtime, and then they wouldn't get back to me. However, with Percona Server, immediately when I have issues, it notifies me, and I resolve the issue or manage it. Percona Server has been a very helpful and useful resource in the enterprise.

Percona Server is a very good stable application, and I think for now, I don't have any additions. It's very good, very resourceful, and very useful.

I would like to add that the user interface is very crowded, which makes it challenging for new engineers to know where to turn, so I had to sit down and understand the documentation before I was able to manage the application myself. If they can make it a little simpler and more functional, that will be helpful.

I have been using Percona Server for almost two years now.

Percona Server is very stable in my experience.

Percona Server's scalability is good, and it handles growth and increased workloads well.

I have not had any experience with customer support for Percona Server.

I did previously use Grafana  and Prometheus before switching to Percona Server.

For setup costs, I use Ansible  and Ansible  Playbook, so it's quite easy to set up. I think that's quite easy, so there's not too much on that.

I have seen a return on investment from using Percona Server, especially in terms of time, as time to resolve issues and time to get notified mean that time is a lot of money.

Before choosing Percona Server, I did not evaluate other options.

My advice for others looking into using Percona Server is that I rely on it; it resolves a lot of enterprise issues, and it's very good in monitoring, so I can recommend it to everyone.

I found this interview fine and do not think anything needs to change for the future. I would rate this review a 10.

Percona Server  serves as our main database server handling user information, real-time GPS coordinates at a 30-second interval, and functions as our GIS  database, reporting database, and secondary to all our databases and applications.

Percona Server  fits into our workflow because we previously used MySQL , and when we discovered that Percona Server truly scales, it felt like MySQL  on steroids. Percona Toolkit gives us an edge with open-source tools for real-time updates, understanding slow queries, and generating corrections if any problems arise with Percona Server, which usually does not happen. The setup of a multi-master, multi-slave configuration of Percona Server scales well and fits into any disaster recovery and business continuity plans, making the platform itself and its purpose exceptional.

Percona Server has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to scale our application effectively. My transition from native MySQL to implementing Percona Server with micro-slow patches and replication has made it possible to scale out and scale back seamlessly.

The biggest improvement has been our ability to scale up and scale out up to three times easily with our existing hardware. Additionally, archiving and sharding have increased the lifespan of our hardware infrastructure, with our total cost of ownership projected for three years extending to five years while accommodating additional customer data.

Percona Server offers outstanding features, including the ability to adjust query performance, table performance, and optimize every aspect including handling of primary and secondary keys, sharding, and partitioning techniques. Percona Toolkit provides great archival checksum mechanisms and replication setups.

Sharding techniques have been beneficial in our application setups because we accumulate about ten thousand vehicles' data every five minutes, which is a huge amount, incurring between five hundred gigabytes to one terabyte of data. We derive sharding based on customer nomenclature into zones and use archival processes to commit to our customers that we will keep approximately thirty-three days of data, archiving the rest for on-demand requests. This combination of sharding and archival makes our lives easier with Percona Server, ensuring that only relevant live data from previous and current periods is accessible for our customers to act on and generate analytics.

I would like to highlight that we use almost all features of Percona Server, including replication, HA replications, primary key lookups, and its operation on XFS, which prompts tuning. Percona Server's query optimizer and tuning capabilities are superb, so any feature we take is exceptional.

To improve Percona Server, I recommend more marketing because many people in the MySQL world know it, but there is a need to let others know that instead of MySQL, they can use Percona Server to enhance their scale-out architectures.

I have been using Percona Server for more than ten years.

Percona Server is stable based on my experience.

Percona Server demonstrates considerable scalability. We find it is easy to scale out and scale in using Percona Operator, Percona XtraDB toolkits, and PXC XtraDB Cluster.

My experience with customer support for Percona Server has been limited to enhancements for Percona Toolkit. We did not reach out regarding the server itself, but the support was quite helpful in assisting us with archivers, replicators, and other commands.

I previously used MySQL, with experience in the open-source version ranging from four point x to eight point x.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has only involved the open-source versions of Percona. While we have a support package for our implementations and installations, we did not purchase Percona Server itself.

I have indeed seen a return on investment. The time and cost savings have allowed us to upskill our employees instead of reducing staff, and the TCO has significantly improved. What was projected for a three-year hardware lifespan extended to five years, yielding a return on investment of more than two times from migrating from MySQL to Percona Server.

Before choosing Percona Server, I evaluated MySQL.

I would advise others looking into using Percona Server to take a look at it since it is MySQL on steroids. It is an open-source solution that continuously scales, and the community commits features regularly, making applications well-maintained and easily recoverable.

I consider Percona Server to be MySQL Enterprise on steroids without licensing fees or restrictions, and it performs exceptionally well.

I have not explored the AI capabilities of Percona Server, so I cannot comment on that aspect. Since I have not experienced the AI capabilities, I can only infer from how Percona Server has helped us in the past. I am confident that the AI capabilities of Percona Server, along with reliability and accuracy, align with any commercial-grade database RDBMS  providers.

I give this review a rating of eight.

My main use case for Percona Server  is that I used it for my MySQL  projects in production in a few different architectures, where we stored our meta information and saved our backups.

Percona Server  offers features that make it function as an enterprise version for MySQL , providing audit logging, thread pooling, and slow query logging, along with extra information schema tables. In general, it has improved significantly when handling large volumes and high concurrency connections compared to regular MySQL.

Percona Server has positively impacted my organization because in cases of high concurrency connection spikes, it really managed to tackle those connections and queries, and it also provided useful features such as audit logging.

From using Percona Server, we observed fast processing.

Percona Server can be improved by addressing the lag between releasing new versions of MySQL and its Percona support, and also by enhancing the configuration of performance variables to provide more user-friendly and easier to configure options.

I have been using Percona Server for seven years.

In my experience, Percona Server is stable.

For us, Percona Server's scalability is sufficient.

We previously used regular MySQL servers, but we needed to switch to support high concurrency connections and access to massive data.

The learning curve for new users of Percona Server is not ideal, and it can take several months to master it.

We have definitely saved money using Percona Server.

Regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing, I know that it was not my position to pay for that or negotiate, but we received the enterprise features for free, and I am not aware of the licensing side of things.

The integration process with other tools or databases when using Percona Server was satisfactory, and we did not have problems with the integration.

I think the documentation and available resources for Percona Server are generally sufficient.

Percona Server's handling of backup and recovery processes worked satisfactorily for us.

Percona Server's performance when handling large data sets was significant compared to regular MySQL, and it was excellent.

Percona Server's monitoring and alerting capabilities, specifically the audit logging, were sufficient for us.

We did not use the community support or forums available for Percona Server at all, so it is difficult for me to provide feedback on that.

In my experience, Percona Server's compatibility has only been with Linux, which was sufficient for us.

My advice to others looking into using Percona Server is that it is a good choice for those who are familiar with MySQL and want to scale up and handle many connections in real time. I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.

My main use case for Percona Server  was for an e-commerce platform, operating as a webshop. The customer had a migration underway where they wanted to move from a certain service provider to managing things themselves. They previously used MariaDB , which did not work, so we needed to move to MySQL , and Percona has a MySQL  derivative that worked for us. The use case also involved running this within a Kubernetes  cluster.

A specific example of how Percona Server was used in that e-commerce platform is that the state was managed through the database, and the entire hydration process occurred there as well. We had server-side rendering happening, and the client-side renders were hydrated through whatever lived in Percona Server database, which resulted in a huge amount of read operations. For redundancy and performance reasons, we worked with about three instances of Percona Server running to ensure that we got the read performance we needed. One issue was the contention and locking that occurred during write operations, and this is where I think Percona showcased that their system was better than other MySQL derivatives.

We used Kubernetes  installed on VPS in Hetzner for that project, and it was very important for us to have a platform that was MySQL compliant, along with all the CRDs, the custom resource definitions, required to use it properly in Kubernetes. We also needed support in managing the service, so having a specialist to tweak those parameters for good database performance was really good to have.

My experience with the Kubernetes-native features was that getting it into Kubernetes was really easy. It is just a Helm chart that you throw in there, and it kind of works. Of course, Helm charts have many intricacies, so parameterizing it correctly was essential, but it provided an out-of-the-box experience for getting it into our cluster.

A cool thing to call out is that they have an observability dashboard for Grafana  to see what is going on, which works seamlessly. It is not just about getting everything in there, but also having visibility into how it works, and we had lots of interesting metrics available to use.

Percona Server offers excellent features including its compliance with the MySQL/Maria dialect, which was essential for our existing application. We faced the challenge of deploying it redundantly in a way that ensured the application would work now and in the future, which involved different replication strategies. Additionally, we needed it to be Kubernetes-native with an operator to check if the database was running and to manage redeployments. Percona provided all of that, along with optimization recommendations from a specialist. There were not many alternatives available, and we also wanted to stay on an open-source stack, which Percona supports to keep everything transparent while providing support as well.

Impact  of Percona Server on my organization has been positive. The database was a mess and did not run well, and we suffered a loss of revenue in that project. The website needed to work, as it was a legacy system with lots of Java applications depending on it. If that database did not work, the website could not even start up, making it extremely important for the e-commerce side to have a well-functioning database.

After switching to Percona Server, we were able to resolve those issues quickly. The platform originally worked with MariaDB , so we spent about three months refactoring the software to accommodate features that MariaDB does not support or supports differently compared to MySQL dialect. The implementation for Percona Server took less than a month, and we have not encountered issues since then.

Percona Server seems great to me overall. If I had to think of any small area for improvement for Percona Server, it would be around the proxy story. When adding a proxy to manage traffic better, we first tried SQL Proxy, but it never really worked for us, which was unfortunate because SQL Proxy offers better optimizations for read performance. We did have success with HAProxy , but it works on a network level, while SQL Proxy was designed to be SQL-aware and distribute parts of the query across the database cluster. The performance gain we were hoping for with SQL Proxy did not materialize, so we remained on the network level with HAProxy .

Databases can be finicky regarding the performance they need. We had some disk I/O latency issues, which led us to use different types of nodes in our Kubernetes cluster where we provisioned Percona Server explicitly. There is a lot of IOPS happening under the hood, and while I suspect the application was not very efficient, it was also challenging to identify that we were experiencing performance issues due to disk performance. It would be helpful to clarify the metrics related to disk I/O latency so we could understand where our bottlenecks are.

I used Percona Server  in a project for about a year.

Percona Server is stable.

Percona Server's scalability is great, which is its core feature.

Percona Server's customer support is excellent with very responsive and friendly service.

We initially struggled with getting MariaDB working, which took a team of six people several months. This was time wasted, whereas with Percona Server, once it is up and running, you really have to do very little.

We evaluated different solutions such as MariaDB and MySQL, but we only evaluated them without implementing them. Our experience with MariaDB was that it did not work for us.

My advice for others looking to use Percona Server is that while it is a great product for making things work, it does not eliminate the need for a database administrator. You still need to know what you are doing, and it can alleviate a lot of the pain of running a database. However, it does not equate to a fully managed database, at least in our use case where we run it in our own Kubernetes cluster. That knowledge is also beneficial when working with a consultant for setup and database optimization.

I was involved on the sideline when it comes to pricing, setup cost, and licensing. I think the pricing was good. What I appreciated was that they packaged support with the licenses, ensuring that we ended up with a working database, which is powerful because it shows that they are focused on solving a problem rather than just selling a product.

We evaluated different solutions such as MariaDB and MySQL, but we only evaluated them without implementing them. Our experience with MariaDB was that it did not work for us.

My advice for others looking to use Percona Server is that while it is a great product for making things work, it does not eliminate the need for a database administrator. You still need to know what you are doing, and it can alleviate a lot of the pain of running a database. However, it does not equate to a fully managed database, at least in our use case where we run it in our own Kubernetes cluster. That knowledge is also beneficial when working with a consultant for setup and database optimization. If you want to go open-source and are knowledgeable about databases, Percona Server is great and will provide everything you need. But if you are looking for a solution without needing to understand databases, this might be too advanced. I would rate this product an 8 overall.