pgDash

pgDash is a comprehensive diagnostic and monitoring solution designed to help you ensure the ongoing health and performance of your PostgreSQL deployment. For more details, see https://pgdash.io.

pgDash supports raising xMatters events when the alerting rules you've set have been tripped (the Alerts page) or when changes to your PostgreSQL server configuration or schema have been detected (the Change Alerts page).

The following sections describe how to setup xMatters and pgDash so that these events can be raised. Note that this is a one-way integration, from pgDash to xMatters.

Prerequisites

• pgDash Account (for the SaaS version), or
• self-hosted pgDash v2.1.0 or later
• xMatters account - If you don't have one, get one!

Files

• pgDash.zip - The xMatters Communication Plan that receives pgDash alerts

How it works

The xMatters communication plan provides two inbound integrations (unique URL endpoints). pgDash does an HTTP POST to these endpoints with a payload containing the properties as defined in the xMatters forms whenever alerts or change alerts happen.

Installation

xMatters set up

1. Download the communication plan pgDash.zip file and import it into your xMatters account. See the help docs for more info. You should see a new entry "pgDash"in your "Communication Plans" page (Developer -> Communication Plans).
2. This communication plan comes with two inbound integrations, one for use with pgDash "Alerts" and for use with pgDash "Change Alerts". Copy the integration URL for each of these. The "URL Authentication" type is the easiest to integrate with pgDash. See the help docs for more info.

pgDash set up

1. Once you have the 2 integration URLs, you can proceed to add them to pgDash. In pgDash, open the PostgreSQL server you want to monitor and navigate to the "Alerts" section on the sidebar. At the end of the page you can see the "Notifications" section (image below). Paste in the integration URL of the "pgdash-inbound-alert" here and click "Update".
2. Similarly, navigate to "Change Alerts" and paste in the integration URL of the "pgdash-inbound-change-alert" into the "Notifications" section and click "Update".

Testing

To test your setup:

1. Add an alerting rule that will surely fire, for example: "Number of backends is greater than 1". Once the Alerts page shows that the rule has been triggered, check to see if xMatters events have been raised.
2. Enable Change Alerts for "List of tables" and create a table in a monitored database. Also set email notification. Once you get the email notification, check if the xMatters events have been raised.

Troubleshooting

1. Ensure that you're using the right integration URL on the right page. The alert integration URL should go into the Alerts page and the Change Alert integration URL should go into the Change Alerts page.
2. If you're using the self-hosted version of pgDash, check the logs at /var/log/pgdash/pgdash.log.
3. For help with the pgDash side of the integration, contact [email protected].

Tips

1. You can also use the "Basic Authentication" and "API Key" authentication methods. Use URLs with embedded username and password ("https://user:[email protected]/") in these cases to supply the username+password (or API Key+secret).