Build Real‑Time MySQL Monitoring & Alerting with Prometheus on Alibaba Cloud

Why Monitor MySQL?

MySQL is one of the most widely used relational databases, and its performance directly impacts the availability of applications. Monitoring key MySQL metrics helps operations teams detect anomalies early, improve system reliability, and enhance user experience.

Key Metric Dimensions

The guide adopts Google’s four golden signals (Latency, Traffic, Saturation, Errors) and refines them for MySQL into five dimensions: availability, connections, queries, traffic, and files.

Choosing the Monitoring Stack

Prometheus is recommended for cloud‑native environments because it is open‑source, avoids vendor lock‑in, and integrates with the community‑maintained mysqld_exporter. Alibaba Cloud offers a one‑click Prometheus integration that deploys the exporter and provides ready‑made dashboards.

Pre‑built Alert Rules

MySQL Down : mysql_up{${instance}} != 1 Instance Uptime (alert if running less than 30 minutes): mysql_global_status_uptime{${instance}} < 1800 Slow Queries :

rate(mysql_global_status_slow_queries{${instance}}[5m]) > 0

Connection Errors :

rate(mysql_global_status_connection_errors_total{${instance}}[5m]) > 0

Connection Usage (alert if > 90 %):

100 * mysql_global_status_threads_connected{${instance}} / mysql_global_variables_max_connections{${instance}} > 90

Open Files Limit :

mysql_global_variables_open_files_limit - mysql_global_variables_innodb_open_files

InnoDB Log Wait Time :

rate(mysql_global_status_innodb_log_waits{${instance}}[5m])

Setup Steps

Enable Alibaba Cloud Prometheus service.

Deploy Prometheus (for containers or ECS) and the MySQL Exporter.

Provide MySQL connection details (host, port, user, password) in the integration center.

Verify connectivity with the built‑in connection test.

After installation, view the auto‑generated dashboards, metrics, and targets.

Configuring Alerts

In the Prometheus console, navigate to MySQL Integration → Alerts → Create Alert Rule , then specify the alert name, group, metric, and threshold using the expressions above.

Monitoring Dashboards

The service provides a ready‑made dashboard showing availability, QPS, connections, query performance, traffic, memory usage, and file metrics.

About Alibaba Cloud Prometheus

Alibaba Cloud Prometheus is a fully managed, cloud‑native observability service built on the open‑source Prometheus project. It integrates with common cloud services, supports Grafana dashboards, intelligent alerts, and provides high‑performance probes. The platform enables rapid, one‑stop metric collection, storage, and analysis for databases, applications, and infrastructure.