title: Hello world!
pgwatch is a scalable and flexible PostgreSQL-specific monitoring solution that offers a comprehensive view of database performance and health. It provides a user-friendly interface through Grafana dashboards, allowing users to easily inspect various metrics and trends.
Visit demo.pgwatch.com for a Grafana demo.
The project started in 2016 by Kaarel Moppel, first released in 2017 as pgwatch2, and was rewritten by Pavlo Golub as the current v3 / v6 (2023+) codebase. For a chronological list of every release with changelogs, see the GitHub releases page.
Cybertec provides commercial 9-to-5 and 24/7 support for pgwatch.
In the world of database management, monitoring plays a crucial role in ensuring stability, performance, and security. With a constant need to keep databases healthy and responsive, pgwatch answers three fundamental questions:
What?
What sources to monitor?
pgwatch is designed specifically for monitoring PostgreSQL databases and related infrastructure. It covers a wide range of components crucial for PostgreSQL ecosystems, including:
- PostgreSQL Databases: pgwatch monitors the core performance and health metrics of your PostgreSQL instances.
- Patroni Clusters: Monitor the health and performance of high-availability cluster members managed by Patroni.
- Connection Poolers (PgPool, PgBouncer): pgwatch provides insights into connection pooling with both PgPool and PgBouncer.
- Backup solutions: Track the performance and status of PgBackRest and WAL-G backups, ensuring that your backups are executed correctly.
This extended monitoring capability allows you to gain a comprehensive view of not only your PostgreSQL databases but also the surrounding infrastructure that supports and enhances your database operations.
How?
What metrics are available for monitoring?
pgwatch provides out-of-the-box support for almost all essential PostgreSQL metrics, including:
- Database health checks
- Query performance
- Index usage
- Disk I/O
- CPU and memory consumption
- Locks, waits, and more
In addition to the standard metrics, pgwatch can be easily extended to monitor custom SQL-based metrics based on your specific needs. The solution offers flexibility to fine-tune monitoring details and the aggressiveness of data collection.
Where?
Where are the measurements stored and where can users inspect the dashboards?
- pgwatch allows users to choose from a variety of storage backends aka sinks for storing monitoring data, such as JSON file, TimescaleDB, Prometheus, PostgreSQL, or a custom gRPC-based backend.
- The user interface for pgwatch is powered by Grafana dashboards, providing interactive and detailed visualization of the collected metrics. Users can easily view the performance and status of their databases in real-time, drill down into historical data, and configure custom dashboard views based on their preferences.
For setup instructions, start with the Quickstart or the Docker installation tutorial. For architectural background, see Components and Advanced features.