We recently started playing with Kontrollbase, a monitoring, analytics and reporting web app specifically for MySQL databases. A relatively fresh project, it presents thorough performance graphs for all the usual database parameters and performance indicators, with the option to choose time periods.
Most useful however, are its automated host performance and tuning reports which offer not only a description of the problem, but also a recommended solution. This makes Kontrollbase stand out as a monitoring tool. Although Nagios is extremely powerful as a general monitoring solution and offers a sense of capacity utilisation, the user must first know what they are looking forl. With Kontrollbase however, no prior knowledge of tuning is required. Being a MySQL specific tool, it can offer much more by way of capacity management and long term analyses for database growth.
The only drawback we’ve found (as seasoned Nagios users) is the lack of a notification system, so the administrator only gets system alerts when he is in the Kontrollbase interface – at least to our current knowledge.
Nonetheless we give Kontrollbase the thumbs up. With multi-tier authentication and client usage without root database or OS access requirements, Kontrollbase should be useful for larger corporations too. We could imagine however, connecting it to Nagios to get multichannel alert notifications that aren’t currently available.
It boasts to be the only MySQL monitoring tool which can run on a LAMP stack, and surprisingly, it is the only open source we’ve seen specific to MySQL- which is a shame. So if you’re aware of any others, please do share.
