Chapter 28. Monitoring Database Activity
Table of Contents
A database administrator frequently wonders, " What is the system doing right now? " This chapter discusses how to find that out.
Several tools are available for monitoring database activity and
analyzing performance. Most of this chapter is devoted to describing
PostgreSQL
's statistics collector,
but one should not neglect regular Unix monitoring programs such as
ps
,
top
,
iostat
, and
vmstat
.
Also, once one has identified a
poorly-performing query, further investigation might be needed using
PostgreSQL
's
EXPLAIN
command.
Section 14.1
discusses
EXPLAIN
and other methods for understanding the behavior of an individual
query.