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PostgreSQL integration for Grafana Cloud

PostgreSQL is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance.

This integration includes 6 useful alerts and 2 pre-built dashboards to help monitor and visualize PostgreSQL metrics and logs.

Before you begin

The PostgreSQL user is required to gather metrics. While you can use root user for testing, we strongly advice that you configure a separate user for the Grafana Agent, and give it only the strictly mandatory security privileges necessary for monitoring your node, as per the official documentation.

Install PostgreSQL integration for Grafana Cloud

  1. In your Grafana Cloud stack, click Connections in the left-hand menu.
  2. Find PostgreSQL and click its tile to open the integration.
  3. Review the prerequisites in the Configuration Details tab and set up Grafana Agent to send PostgreSQL metrics and logs to your Grafana Cloud instance.
  4. Click Install to add this integration’s pre-built dashboards and alerts to your Grafana Cloud instance, and you can start monitoring your PostgreSQL setup.

Post-install configuration for the PostgreSQL integration

Enable the integration by manually adding the provided snippets to your agent configuration file.

This integration supports metrics and logs from Postgres. In order to see those signals correlated on your dashboard, as a single pane of glass, ensure the following:

  • job and instance labels must match for postgres_exporter(metrics) and logs in the Agent configuration file.
  • job label must be set to integrations/postgres_exporter (already configured in the snippets).
  • instance label must be set to a value that uniquely identifies your Postgres Node. Replace it manually, according to your environment. Note that if you use localhost for multiple nodes, the dashboards will not be able to filter correctly by instance.

Make sure to change the data_source_names to the addresses of the Postgres servers you want to monitor in the agent config.

For a full description of configuration options see how to configure the postgres_exporter_config block in the agent documentation.

Make sure to configure the right logs path to scrape your postgres log files under __path__ entry of your log snippet. To indetify your logs location, please follow the official documentation.

Configuration snippets for Grafana Agent

Below integrations, insert the following lines and change the URLs according to your environment:

yaml 
  postgres_exporter:
    enabled: true
    instance: '<your-instance-name>' # must match instance used in logs
    data_source_names:
      - 'postgresql://<username>:<password>@<your_postgres_instance_name>:5432/postgres' # replace with your connection string

Below logs.configs.scrape_configs, insert the following lines according to your environment.

yaml 
    - job_name: integrations/postgres_exporter
      static_configs:
      - targets:
        - localhost
        labels:
          instance: '<your-instance-name>'
          __path__: /usr/local/var/log/postgres.log
          job: integrations/postgres_exporter

Full example configuration for Grafana Agent

Refer to the following Grafana Agent configuration for a complete example that contains all the snippets used for the PostgreSQL integration. This example also includes metrics that are sent to monitor your Grafana Agent instance.

yaml 
integrations:
  prometheus_remote_write:
  - basic_auth:
      password: <your_prom_pass>
      username: <your_prom_user>
    url: <your_prom_url>
  agent:
    enabled: true
    relabel_configs:
    - action: replace
      source_labels:
      - agent_hostname
      target_label: instance
    - action: replace
      target_label: job
      replacement: "integrations/agent-check"
    metric_relabel_configs:
    - action: keep
      regex: (prometheus_target_.*|prometheus_sd_discovered_targets|agent_build.*|agent_wal_samples_appended_total|process_start_time_seconds)
      source_labels:
      - __name__
  # Add here any snippet that belongs to the `integrations` section.
  # For a correct indentation, paste snippets copied from Grafana Cloud at the beginning of the line.
  postgres_exporter:
    enabled: true
    instance: '<your-instance-name>' # must match instance used in logs
    data_source_names:
      - 'postgresql://<username>:<password>@<your_postgres_instance_name>:5432/postgres' # replace with your connection string
logs:
  configs:
  - clients:
    - basic_auth:
        password: <your_loki_pass>
        username: <your_loki_user>
      url: <your_loki_url>
    name: integrations
    positions:
      filename: /tmp/positions.yaml
    scrape_configs:
      # Add here any snippet that belongs to the `logs.configs.scrape_configs` section.
      # For a correct indentation, paste snippets copied from Grafana Cloud at the beginning of the line.
    - job_name: integrations/postgres_exporter
      static_configs:
      - targets:
        - localhost
        labels:
          instance: '<your-instance-name>'
          __path__: /usr/local/var/log/postgres.log
          job: integrations/postgres_exporter
metrics:
  configs:
  - name: integrations
    remote_write:
    - basic_auth:
        password: <your_prom_pass>
        username: <your_prom_user>
      url: <your_prom_url>
    scrape_configs:
      # Add here any snippet that belongs to the `metrics.configs.scrape_configs` section.
      # For a correct indentation, paste snippets copied from Grafana Cloud at the beginning of the line.
  global:
    scrape_interval: 60s
  wal_directory: /tmp/grafana-agent-wal

Dashboards

The PostgreSQL integration installs the following dashboards in your Grafana Cloud instance to help monitor your system.

  • PostgreSQL logs
  • PostgreSQL overview

PostgreSQL overview dashboard

image

PostgreSQL logs dashboard

image

Alerts

The PostgreSQL integration includes the following useful alerts:

AlertDescription
PostgreSQLMaxConnectionsReachedWarning: Postgres connections count is over the maximum amount.
PostgreSQLHighConnectionsWarning: Postgres connections count is over 80% of maximum amount.
PostgreSQLDownWarning: PostgreSQL is not processing queries.
PostgreSQLSlowQueriesWarning: PostgreSQL high number of slow queries.
PostgreSQLQPSWarning: PostgreSQL high number of queries per second.
PostgreSQLCacheHitRatioWarning: PostgreSQL low cache hit rate.

Metrics

The most important metrics provided by the PostgreSQL integration, which are used on the pre-built dashboards and Prometheus alerts, are as follows:

  • pg_settings_max_connections
  • pg_settings_superuser_reserved_connections
  • pg_stat_activity_count
  • pg_stat_activity_max_tx_duration
  • pg_stat_bgwriter_buffers_alloc
  • pg_stat_bgwriter_buffers_backend
  • pg_stat_bgwriter_buffers_backend_fsync
  • pg_stat_bgwriter_buffers_checkpoint
  • pg_stat_bgwriter_buffers_clean
  • pg_stat_database_blks_hit
  • pg_stat_database_blks_read
  • pg_stat_database_conflicts
  • pg_stat_database_deadlocks
  • pg_stat_database_numbackends
  • pg_stat_database_tup_deleted
  • pg_stat_database_tup_fetched
  • pg_stat_database_tup_inserted
  • pg_stat_database_tup_returned
  • pg_stat_database_tup_updated
  • pg_stat_database_xact_commit
  • pg_stat_database_xact_rollback
  • pg_up

Changelog

md 
# 1.0.3 - September 2023

* New Filter Metrics option for configuring the Grafana Agent, which saves on metrics cost by dropping any metric not used by this integration. Beware that anything custom built using metrics that are not on the snippet will stop working.
* New hostname relabel option, which applies the instance name you write on the text box to the Grafana Agent configuration snippets, making it easier and less error prone to configure this mandatory label.

# 1.0.2 - August 2023

* Add regex filter for logs datasource

# 1.0.1 - August 2023

* Fix typo in agent instructions

# 1.0.0 - August 2023

* Add K8s support
* Add Logs dashboard
* Support cluster/multicluster visualization
* New Filter Metrics option for configuring the Grafana Agent, which saves on metrics cost by dropping any metric not used by this integration. Beware that anything custom built using metrics that are not on the snippet will stop working.
* New hostname relabel option, which applies the instance name you write on the text box to the Grafana Agent configuration snippets, making it easier and less error prone to configure this mandatory label.

# 0.0.4 - April 2023

* Fix cache hit ratio panel
* Use psql specific metric pg_up to avoid return of postgres unrelated instances
* Change panels to timeseries
* Move QPS to left and remove transparency for common style
* Fix conflict/deadlock metrics

# 0.0.3 - May 2022

* Use `$job` template variable in selectors for all queries
* Reorder template variables in dashboard UI
* Enable multi-select for job and instance template variables
* Filter instance template variable query by selected value(s) for job template variable

# 0.0.2 - October 2021

* Update all rate queries to use `$__rate_interval`

# 0.0.1 - December 2020

* Initial release

Cost

By connecting your PostgreSQL instance to Grafana Cloud, you might incur charges. To view information on the number of active series that your Grafana Cloud account uses for metrics included in each Cloud tier, see Active series and dpm usage and Cloud tier pricing.

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