Set up Database Observability

Set up Database Observability with Grafana Cloud for MySQL and PostgreSQL. You configure your databases and Grafana Alloy to collect metrics and logs and send them to Grafana Cloud.

Get started

Get visibility into database performance across your infrastructure and diagnose incidents quickly. First-time setup typically takes 30-60 minutes.

Review requirements to plan your deployment.
Set up database monitoring with appropriate permissions.
Configure Alloy for multi-database or Kubernetes deployments.
Monitor your database query performance.
Investigate any performance anomalies.

Key features:

Query-level performance insights with RED metrics (rate, errors, duration) to identify slow and failing queries.
Query samples to inspect individual query executions with timing and parameter details.
Visual explain plans to see exactly how your database executes each query and where time is spent.
Table schema details so you can spot missing indexes or schema issues affecting performance.

Before you begin

Review the requirements and overhead to understand:

System requirements for Alloy and your databases
Required database permissions
Performance overhead of monitoring
Resource sizing for your deployment

Set up by database type

MySQL setup: Configure MySQL, Aurora MySQL, RDS MySQL, Cloud SQL MySQL, or Azure MySQL.
PostgreSQL setup: Configure PostgreSQL, Aurora PostgreSQL, RDS PostgreSQL, Cloud SQL PostgreSQL, or Azure PostgreSQL.

Pricing

Database Observability charges for the telemetry consumed following Grafana Cloud pricing. This includes:

Metrics: Prometheus metrics from database exporters
Logs: Structured logs for query samples, schemas, and explain plans

We’ll provide further information about per-instance pricing changes as Database Observability approaches General Availability.

Explore next steps

Requirements and overhead
System requirements and performance overhead for Database Observability.
Set up MySQL
Set up Database Observability for MySQL and managed MySQL services using Grafana Alloy and Grafana Cloud.
Set up PostgreSQL
Set up Database Observability for PostgreSQL and managed PostgreSQL services using Grafana Alloy and Grafana Cloud.