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Sending Prometheus Metrics to Datadog for PlanetScale for Postgres

Postgres

(Updated )

If you're looking for more metrics than PlanetScale's native Datadog integration provides, this tutorial will show how to configure your Datadog agent to scrape PlanetScale's Prometheus infrastructure automatically, allowing you to collect detailed metrics for all of your PlanetScale for Postgres branches.

Overview

In this tutorial, this guide assumes that you have a Datadog Agent Version 7 running. For more information on what the Datadog Agent is and how to install it, start with the Datadog Agent documentation.

For the purposes of this guide, the examples use a Datadog agent running with the recommended installation steps on a Linux system.

Prerequisites

You'll need a working Datadog agent and access to add a Custom Agent Check to that instance. This may require root or sudo access on the machine running the Datadog agent.

You'll also need a Service token in your Organization, with the read_metrics_endpoints permission granted.

Adding the Plugin to the Datadog Agent

Go to https://github.com/planetscale/planetscale-datadog, which is the repository that has our custom OpenMetrics Check.

Place the unedited planetscale.py in the checks.d directory of your Datadog Agent.

  • On Linux, that is /etc/datadog-agent/checks.d/
  • On macOS, that is /opt/datadog-agent/etc/checks.d/

Make sure that it belongs to the appropriate user. If you're using the recommended Linux installation steps, it will have created a dd-agent user:

$ pwd
/etc/datadog-agent/checks.d
$ ls -al planetscale.py
-rw-r--r-- 1 dd-agent dd-agent 9261 Apr  2 22:54 planetscale.py

This file is owned by the dd-agent user and group in the /etc/datadog-agent/checks.d directory.

If you're on macOS, it will depend on whether you installed the agent as a 'Single User Agent' or a 'Systemwide Agent'. If you picked Single User, there should be no additional permission changes needed. If you installed it as a Systemwide agent, make sure the user and group you installed the agent with have ownership of the file.

Configuring the Datadog Agent

Now that you have the plugin installed, you need to configure it. In the conf.d directory of the Datadog agent take the conf.d/planetscale.yaml.example file and edit it with your organization name and Service Token information. It should look like this:

instances:
  - planetscale_organization: 'your-org' # Required: Your PlanetScale organization ID
    ps_service_token_id: '${TOKEN_ID}' # Required: Your PlanetScale Service Token ID
    ps_service_token_secret: '${TOKEN}' # Required: Your PlanetScale Service Token Secret. Consider using Datadog secrets management: https://docs.datadoghq.com/agent/guide/secrets-management/

    namespace: 'planetscale_postgres' # Required: Namespace for the metrics
    metrics: # Required: List of metrics to collect. Use mapping for renaming/type overrides.
      - planetscale_postgres_connection_state: postgres_connection_state
      - planetscale_edge_postgres_active_connections: edge_active_connections

    min_collection_interval: 60
    send_distribution_buckets: true
    collect_counters_with_distributions: true

This configures the integration to look for all of the branches in your PlanetScale organization, collect specific Postgres metrics, and put them inside the planetscale_postgres namespace.

Save the file as planetscale.yaml, making sure to double check permissions:

$ pwd
/etc/datadog-agent/conf.d
$ ls -al planetscale.yaml
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1518 Apr  2 22:57 planetscale.yaml

Restart the Datadog Agent

Now that this is configured and installed, restart the Agent:

$ sudo systemctl restart datadog-agent

Validating the PlanetScale Plugin

Now that the Datadog Agent is running the PlanetScale plugin, metrics should start flowing into Datadog within a couple of minutes. To validate, you can check the Datadog Agent:

sudo -u dd-agent -- datadog-agent check planetscale

If the plugin is installed successfully, this should output the scrape targets for your branches, as well as metadata about when it was last run and how many metrics were emitted.

Adding Metrics

In the earlier configuration, only two metrics were added. For a complete list of what PlanetScale for Postgres exposes, please take a look at the Postgres Metrics Reference Documentation.

Note that the Datadog agent normalizes metrics with certain suffixes starting in v7.32.0:

Starting in Datadog Agent v7.32.0, in adherence to the OpenMetrics specification standard, counter names ending in _total must be specified without the _total suffix. For example, to collect promhttp_metric_handler_requests_total, specify the metric name promhttp_metric_handler_requests. This submits to Datadog the metric name appended with .count, promhttp_metric_handler_requests.count.

This means that to scrape a metric such as planetscale_postgres_database_xact_commit_total, you would configure the Datadog agent for planetscale_postgres_database_xact_commit.

If you want to collect additional metrics, you can add them to the list:

    metrics: # Required: List of metrics to collect. Use mapping for renaming/type overrides.
      - planetscale_postgres_connection_state: postgres_connection_state
      - planetscale_edge_postgres_active_connections: edge_active_connections
      - planetscale_postgres_wal_size_bytes: postgres_wal_size
      - planetscale_psbouncer_current_connections: psbouncer_connections

Then, restart the Datadog Agent:

$ sudo systemctl restart datadog-agent

What's Next?

Now that you're sending Postgres metrics from PlanetScale to Datadog, take a look at our full list and start building dashboards to monitor your PostgreSQL database performance, connection health, and resource utilization!

Need help?

Get help from the PlanetScale Support team, or join our GitHub discussion board to see how others are using PlanetScale.