This short guide will explain how to use a free command line utility to monitor a MySQL database in real-time.
mytop is a top-like realtime command line based monitoring system for MySQL. It is written by Jeremy Zawodny, and is available for free download. It runs on most UNIX-based systems, and most definitely on Linux machines. This kind of real-time monitoring can be very useful when administering a MySQL server.
You need a working MySQL server and a few Perl modules such as DBI, DBD::mysql, Term::ReadKey, and Getopt::Long to be able to use mytop. You can download the source code version of mytop from the project’s website, or you can get a pre-built binary package for your distribution. I know that there are packages for Fedora/Redhat and for Ubuntu systems. You should be able to find them pretty easily on the web. Once you get the binary version of mytop install it.
Once you have installed mytop you can check if it is working using the following command:
# mytop -h dbserver -u dbuser -p dbpassword
MySQL on dbserver (5.0.37) up 50+17:53:46 [13:20:38]
Queries: 2.5G qps: 609 Slow: 0.0 Se/In/Up/De(%): 01/00/00/00
Key Efficiency: 99.8% Bps in/out: 0.0/ 0.0
Id User Host/IP DB Time Cmd Query or State
— —- ——- — —- — ———-
9570443 dbuser 192.168.10.9 appdb 0 Prepar
9575575 dbuser 192.168.10.9 appdb 0 Sleep
9576920 dbuser 192.168.10.9 appdb 0 Sleep
9593343 dbuser 192.168.10.4 appdb 0 Sleep
9601720 dbuser 192.168.10.3 appdb 0 Query show full process
9574728 dbuser 192.168.10.9 appdb 1 Sleep
9575771 dbuser 192.168.10.9 appdb 1 Sleep
9579103 dbuser 192.168.10.9 appdb 1 Sleep
9579962 dbuser 192.168.10.4 appdb 1 Sleep
9581070 dbuser 192.168.10.4 appdb 1 Sleep
9585516 dbuser 192.168.10.4 appdb 1 Sleep
9585518 dbuser 192.168.10.4 appdb 1 Sleep
9597503 dbuser 192.168.10.4 appdb 1 Sleep
9597952 dbuser 192.168.10.4 appdb 1 Sleep
9599442 dbuser 192.168.10.9 appdb 1 Sleep
Replace dbserver, dbuser, and dbpassword with the correct credentials of your MySQL server. This ought to get you off the blocks with mytop. You can read up on mytop via the documentation section of the mytop site.
While you’re here, maybe you’d like to check out our other MySQL tips, tricks and tutorials.
