5. Monitor database with Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM)¶

In this section you will learn how to monitor Percona Server for MongoDB with Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) .

Note

Only PMM 2.x versions are supported by the Operator.

PMM is a client/server application. It includes the PMM Server and the number of PMM Clients running on each node with the database you wish to monitor.

A PMM Client collects needed metrics and sends gathered data to the PMM Server. As a user, you connect to the PMM Server to see database metrics on a number of dashboards .

PMM Server and PMM Client are installed separately.

Install PMM Server¶

You must have PMM server up and running. You can run PMM Server as a Docker image, a virtual appliance, or on an AWS instance. Please refer to the official PMM documentation for the installation instructions.

Install PMM Client¶

To install PMM Client as a side-car container in your Kubernetes-based environment, do the following:

Authorize PMM Client within PMM Server.
Token-based authorization (recommended)Password-based authorization (deprecated since version 1.13.0)
1. Generate the PMM Server API Key . Specify the Admin role when getting the API Key.

Warning: The API key is not rotated automatically.
1. Edit the deploy/secrets.yaml secrets file and specify the PMM API key for the PMM_SERVER_API_KEY option.
2. Apply the configuration for the changes to take effect.
  
  $ kubectl apply -f deploy/secrets.yaml -n <namespace>
1. Edit the deploy/secrets.yaml secrets file and specify the following:
2. The user name of your PMM Server (admin by default) in the PMM_SERVER_USER key
3. The password you set for the PMM Server during its installation in the PMM_SERVER_PASSWORD key.
4. Apply the configuration for the changes to take effect.
  
  $ kubectl apply -f deploy/secrets.yaml -n <namespace>
Update the pmm section in the deploy/cr.yaml file:
- Set pmm.enabled=true.
- Specify your PMM Server hostname / an IP address for the pmm.serverHost option. The PMM Server IP address should be resolvable and reachable from within your cluster.
```
  pmm:
    enabled: true
    image: percona/pmm-client:2.44.1
    serverHost: monitoring-service
```
3. Apply the changes:
```
$ kubectl apply -f deploy/cr.yaml -n <namespace>
```
Check that corresponding Pods are not in a cycle of stopping and restarting. This cycle occurs if there are errors on the previous steps:
```
$ kubectl get pods -n <namespace>
$ kubectl logs <cluster-name>-rs0-0 -c pmm-client -n <namespace>
```

Check the metrics¶

Let’s see how the collected data is visualized in PMM.

Log in to PMM server.
Click MongoDB from the left-hand navigation menu. You land on the Instances Overview page.
Select your cluster from the Clusters drop-down menu and the desired time range on the top of the page. You should see the metrics.
Click MongoDB → Other dashboards to see the list of available dashboards that allow you to drill down to the metrics you are interested in.

Next steps¶

What’s next

Last update: 2025-06-05