A Percona Support Engineer Walkthrough for pt-stalk


As a support engineer, every day I get dozens of pt-stalk captures from our customers containing samples of iostat, vmstat, top, ps, SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS, SHOW PROCESSLIST and a multitude of other diagnostics outputs.

These are the tools of the trade for performance and troubleshooting, and we must learn to digest these outputs in an effective and systematic way. This allows us to provide high-quality service to a large volume of customers.

In this presentation, we will share the knowledge we’ve gained working with this data, and how to apply it to your database environment.

We will learn to setup, capture data, write plugins to trigger collection and to capture custom data, look at our systematic approach and learn what data to read first and how to unwind the tangled threads of pt-stalk.

By the end of this presentation, you will have expert knowledge on how to capture diagnostic metrics at the right time and have a generic approach to digest the captured data. This allows you to diagnose and solve many of problems common to MySQL setups.