Why Monitor PostgreSQL Database Health?

Just like monitoring our applications, it is very much necessary to monitor our database system. We want to monitor things substantially more granular than system-level processes — things such as:

• How many queries actually make use of the index?
• How effective is the database cache?
• The number of open connections.

And so on.

Hardware metrics are essential, but can only get us so far, and will not help us make concrete decisions — like which queries to optimize and how we are using our database in general. Since PostgreSQL is an open-source database, it offers a lot of insights for free without having to rely on costly tools. Most of the metrics we are going to track are available by default since they are required for the query planner, but there are other critical areas for which we have to enable certain extensions/contrib modules that ship along with PostgreSQL.

Introduction to the Arctype Tool

Arctype is a very neat database tool that can be used not just as an SQL editor but also as a platform upon which complex dashboards can be both custom-built and shared around with developers/users. To understand its true power, we are going to consider a practical use case — monitoring a PostgreSQL database health.

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