Spot slow MySQL queries fast with Stackdriver Monitoring

When you’re serving customers online, speed is essential for a good experience. As the amount of data in a database grows, queries that used to be fast can slow down. For example, if a query has to scan every row because a table is missing an index, response times that were acceptable with a thousand rows can turn into multiple seconds of waiting once you have a million rows. If this query is executed every time a user loads your web page, their browsing experience will slow to a crawl, causing user frustration. Slow queries can also impact automated jobs, causing them to time out before completion. If there are too many of these slow queries executing at once, the database can even run out of connections, causing all new queries, slow or fast, to fail.

The popular open-source databases MySQL and Google Cloud Platform‘s fully managed version, Cloud SQL for MySQL, include a feature to log slow queries, letting you find the cause, then optimize for better performance. However, developers and database administrators typically only access this slow query log reactively, after users have seen the effects and escalated the performance degradation.

With Stackdriver Logging and Monitoring, you can stay ahead of the curve for database performance with automatic alerts when query latency goes over the threshold, and a monitoring dashboard that lets you quickly pinpoint the specific queries causing the slowdown.