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Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM)

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What is Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM)

Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) is an open-source monitoring and management platform focused on database performance and observability. It is used by DBAs, SREs, and operations teams to collect metrics, query analytics, and diagnostics for supported database systems and related infrastructure. PMM is typically deployed as a server with agents/exporters and provides dashboards and alerting through an integrated web UI. It emphasizes database-specific insights (for example, query-level analysis) rather than broad, full-stack application observability.

pros

Database-focused query analytics

PMM provides query analytics that helps teams identify expensive or high-latency queries and understand workload patterns over time. It is designed around database performance workflows (triage, root-cause analysis, tuning) rather than generic host monitoring. This focus can reduce time spent correlating raw metrics when the primary problem domain is database performance.

Open-source and self-hosted

PMM is available as open-source software and is commonly run in self-managed environments. This can fit organizations that require on-premises deployment, data residency controls, or customization of dashboards and retention policies. It also reduces dependency on a single SaaS control plane for monitoring data.

Integrates common observability components

PMM packages a web UI, time-series metrics storage, dashboards, and alerting into a single deployable solution. It supports agent-based collection and integrates with common exporters to gather system and database metrics. This can simplify standing up a database monitoring stack compared with assembling separate components.

cons

Narrower than full-stack APM

PMM primarily targets databases and related host metrics rather than end-to-end application tracing and service-level dependency mapping. Teams looking for unified observability across applications, middleware, and user experience may need additional tools. As a result, PMM is often one part of a broader monitoring strategy.

Operational overhead to manage

Running PMM requires maintaining the PMM server, agents/exporters, upgrades, and storage sizing for metrics and query analytics. In large environments, retention and performance tuning of the monitoring stack can become a recurring task. This overhead can be higher than fully managed monitoring services.

Coverage varies by database type

Depth of metrics and query analytics depends on the specific database engine and version being monitored and the available collectors. Some environments may not get the same level of insight across all database platforms or managed cloud variants. Teams may need to validate feature parity for their exact database mix before standardizing.

Plan & Pricing

Plan Price Key features & notes
Community / PMM (self-hosted) Free (open source) AGPL-3.0 open-source PMM; includes Query Analytics, Percona Advisors, alerting, backup & restore, and Private DBaaS features. Self-hosted; no subscription required.

Seller details

Percona LLC
Durham, North Carolina, USA
2006
Private
https://www.percona.com/
https://x.com/percona
https://www.linkedin.com/company/percona/

Tools by Percona LLC

Percona Server
Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL
Percona Server for MongoDB
Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC)
Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster
Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM)
Percona Backup for MongoDB
Percona XtraBackup for MySQL

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