Monitoring MySQL Database with mysqld_exporter Plugin and Prometheus

First, create a new user in the database:

CREATE USER 'exporter'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'promethues' WITH MAX_USER_CONNECTIONS 3;
GRANT PROCESS, REPLICATION CLIENT, SELECT ON *.* TO 'exporter'@'%';
flush privileges;

exporter is the username, and promethues is the password.

Define the database connection configuration file (my.cnf):

[client]
host=127.0.0.1
port=3306
user=exporter
password=promethues

Open https://github.com/prometheus/mysqld_exporter/releases to download the plugin.

Run the command:

./mysqld_exporter --config.my-cnf=/data/exporter/my.cnf 

Docker deployment:

docker network create my-mysql-network
docker pull prom/mysqld-exporter

docker run -itd \
  --restart=always \
  -p 9104:9104 \
  --network my-mysql-network  \
  -v /data/exporter/my.cnf:/opt/my.cnf \
  prom/mysqld-exporter \
  --config.my-cnf=/opt/my.cnf

Next, modify the prometheus.yml file to monitor mysqld-exporter by adding the following configuration:

  - job_name: "dev_mysql"
    scrape_interval: 5s
    metrics_path: "/metrics"
    static_configs:
      - targets: ["192.168.80.81:9104"]

Restart Prometheus.

Next, download the mysqld_exporter monitoring dashboard by opening https://github.com/prometheus/mysqld_exporter/tree/main/mysqld-mixin.

Download the appropriate template, for example, dashboards/mysql-overview.json. Then import it into Grafana.