Overview

After setting up the Postgres Monitor agent, you're ready to investigate and improve your database's performance.

See below for how to get started with Postgres Monitor.

Observe Your Database Metrics & Health

Use the Metrics page to look for database problems:

• Look for high Load Avg which can show that a PostgreSQL server is overloaded with too much work
• Look at low cache hit rates for your database or for specific tables which may show that your tables are missing needed indexes or that your database plan should be upgraded to a larger instance with more memory
• Explore your replication metrics such as replication lag to ensure your replicas are healthy

Investigate Your Slowest Queries

Look into how your SQL queries are performing:

• Find your slowest queries and read their explain plans when available
• Look at your most time consuming queries, defined as the number of query calls times the average query time
• Or investigate your most called or slowest I/O queries

Review Your Recommendations

Postgres Monitor makes recommendations for how to improve the performance or reliability of your database.

• Find unused or redundant indexes that can be dropped to save disk space or speed up slow writes
• Find invalid indexes that need rebuilding
• See if table scans are occurring for queries that are not using indexes
• Find underindexed tables where cache hit rates are too low or evaluate if it's time to upgrade your database instance

Note: recommendations may take up to a day to appear after adding a new database to your agent.

Explore Your Tables & Indexes

See how your tables compare to one another by disk size and estimated number of rows, or explore your table and index schemas that have been created on your database.