After some testing and setup we have decided to use Eventum for our support ticketing needs. This featureful system will be in use for all of your support questions related to Kontrollbase – the MySQL analytics and performance tuning web application, as well as Kontrollkit – the collection of server automation scripts. You can read about Eventum on their homepage, and use our system for any support needs here: http://support.kontrollsoft.com. As always you can find information about our support structure on our support page.

Just a quick notice to let everyone know that there is a new version of Kontrollkit available. There are two new scripts included as well as some good updates to the my.cnf files. You can download the new version here: http://kontrollsoft.com/software-downloads

kt-mysql-systemcheck – generates a report for point-in-time system status that is useful for troubleshooting MySQL servers
kt-url-monitor – monitors a given URL for successful return code. Has email functionality for reporting.

If you have been reading the Kontrollbase performance reports and noticed that one alert says your connection usage vs max connections ration is too high but then recommends you to decrease the max_connections variable, then you will find this fix handy. Its two simple queries that execute on the Kontrollbase schema to update the max_connections alert name and description.

Since this particular alert’s logic was changed to display a recommendation for lowering and/or increasing the max_connections variable depending on the usage percentage, the name and description of the alert in the schema needs to be updated as well. If you prefer you can wait until the next version comes out that addresses this change, or you can run the following two queries on your Kontrollbase schema to update the information. Enjoy!

update alerts_def set alert_desc = 'Server connection usage ratio needs to be optimized.' where id = '5';
update alerts_def set alert_name = 'max_connections to max_used_connections ratio not optimal.' where id = '5';

It is a pleasure to announce that Kontrollbase – the MySQL analytics and performance monitoring webapp for MySQL servers – has a new sponsor. Network Redux is located in Portland, Oregon and offers enterprise quality dedicated and managed hosting as well as cloud services. Thomas Brenneke contacted me to discuss his interest in utilizing the Kontrollbase feature set for his MySQL customers that needed advanced reporting and insight into the operation of their database infrastrucures. As a firm supporter of Open Source projects he offered to provide the infrastructure we need for our development and production servers and we gladly accepted. As of mid-February all of our development and production systems were migrated to the Network Redux servers and the performance increase and first rate support has been a welcome addition to providing the MySQL community with Kontrollbase as your solution to MySQL analytics and performance tuning needs.

Here is some information about Network Redux: “Based out of Portland, Oregon, we privately own and operate our server, storage and networking equipment within Time Warner Telecom and LightPoint Communications’ state of the art datacenters. Network Redux services are premised on the fundamentals of honesty, open communication and quality infrastructure. Our commitment to you as the customer is more then just competitive pricing and fantastically scalable hosting services, our commitment extends to the open source community, including those involved in developing and maintaining the architecture empowering our operations.”

The time has come for major performance improvements to the reporter, stats-gather, alerter, and client scripts. This means that I will be rewriting the scripts in Python. A couple of reasons for this; to cut down on the number of modules that are required for the installation process (which also makes distributing the client script a simpler matter), as well as a general speed improvement. Preliminary tests have shown similar tasks in perl vs python to give python the winning hand for processing performance. In particular I’m interested in making the server-loop script, and it’s subsequent script chain, multi-threaded. This is a big change since the current polling process is serialized.

Before I start rewriting these scripts I am extending an offer to the community: if you would like particular changes or improvements (other than performance) or new additions to the scripts which control the data gathering process, please let me know. Comment on this post or email me at ‘support at kontrollsoft dot c o m’ to make your recommendations now.

We have a new users’s group on Brijj for anyone that wants to keep up to date with discussions and wants to increase their network profile on the site. Join now: http://www.brijj.com/group/kontrollbase-users

I’ve been looking over the documentation lately and trying to find ways to improve the installation experience for new users. That said, I’ve written a short but useful description of the easiest way to install all of the Perl and PHP requirements for Kontrollbase. You can find it here: http://kontrollsoft.com/kontrollbase/userguide/installation-install_overview.php#simple – or in the Installation Overview section of the documentation that is bundled with the application as of revision 282.

Kontrollbase – the enterprise monitoring and analytics application for MySQL – has been a relatively easy application to install if you have experience working with package management on Linux servers, and now it just got easier. This new documentation should get new users up and running in significantly less time that before.