Crunchy Data PostgreSQL Monitoring

Monitoring Crunchy Bridge

Crunchy Bridge is a fully managed PostgreSQL service available on AWS, Azure, and GCP. While Bridge provides excellent built-in metrics through its dashboard and pgMonitor integration, teams running production workloads often need deeper query-level analysis, index optimization, and vacuum tuning that go beyond infrastructure metrics.

MonPG's collector connects to your Crunchy Bridge cluster using the standard PostgreSQL connection string. It queries pg_stat_statements, pg_stat_activity, pg_stat_user_tables, and other system views to build a comprehensive performance picture. Since Crunchy Bridge supports all standard PostgreSQL extensions and features, MonPG works out of the box with zero configuration beyond the connection string.

• Query performance tracking: Every query traced — execution time, rows, block I/O, temp files. Historical trends show regressions before users notice.
• Index advisor: Crunchy Bridge supports standard PostgreSQL indexing. MonPG analyzes your query patterns and recommends indexes with what-if simulation — estimating impact before creation.
• Vacuum monitoring: Track autovacuum effectiveness per table, dead tuple accumulation, and XID age. Get per-table tuning recommendations specific to your workload.
• Connection tracking: Monitor connection usage against your Bridge plan limits. Identify idle connections and per-application connection patterns.

Monitoring Crunchy PGO (PostgreSQL Operator)

Crunchy PGO deploys and manages PostgreSQL clusters on Kubernetes. It includes pgMonitor with Prometheus exporters, Grafana dashboards, and pgBackRest for backups. MonPG complements this stack by providing:

• Query-level analysis beyond Prometheus: Prometheus + postgres_exporter gives you aggregate metrics. MonPG gives you individual query analysis — which specific queries are slow, which need indexes, which execution plans changed.
• Index and vacuum advisors: pgMonitor shows you that autovacuum is running. MonPG tells you which tables need different autovacuum settings and which queries would benefit from specific indexes.
• Multi-cluster management: Deploy MonPG's collector as a sidecar container in each PGO cluster. All clusters report to a single MonPG dashboard, giving you a unified view across your entire PostgreSQL fleet.
• Patroni and HA awareness: PGO uses Patroni for high availability. MonPG monitors replication lag, failover events, and replica health across your Patroni-managed clusters.

MonPG + pgMonitor: Better Together

Crunchy's pgMonitor stack (Prometheus + Grafana + postgres_exporter) excels at infrastructure-level monitoring — CPU, memory, disk, connection counts, replication lag. MonPG operates at the query and schema level — individual query performance, index recommendations, vacuum tuning, lock analysis.

The two tools complement each other. pgMonitor tells you that something is wrong (CPU spike, connection surge). MonPG tells you why (a specific query scanning a table without an index, a vacuum falling behind on a hot table, a lock chain blocking your application).

Deployment on Kubernetes with PGO

Deploy the MonPG collector as a Kubernetes Deployment in the same namespace as your PGO cluster. Configure it with the PostgreSQL service endpoint and your MonPG API key:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: monpg-collector
spec:
  replicas: 1
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: collector
          image: ghcr.io/devopzone-eood/monpg-collector:latest
          env:
            - name: MONPG_API_KEY
              valueFrom:
                secretKeyRef:
                  name: monpg-secrets
                  key: api-key
            - name: PG_HOST
              value: hippo-primary.postgres-operator.svc
            - name: PG_PORT
              value: "5432"

The collector connects to the primary service endpoint. For read replica monitoring, configure additional connection targets. No sidecar injection or CRD modifications needed — the collector is a standalone deployment.

Crunchy Bridge Plan Monitoring

Crunchy Bridge offers Hobby, Standard, and Premium plans with different resource allocations and connection limits. MonPG tracks your resource utilization against your plan limits, helping you decide when to upgrade and identifying optimization opportunities that could defer scaling.

Combined with MonPG's index optimization and vacuum tuning, you can often improve performance significantly before needing a larger plan.

Related Resources

• How to Find and Fix Slow Queries — Query-level analysis that complements pgMonitor.
• Replication Monitoring Guide — Monitor Patroni-managed replication in PGO clusters.
• Self-Hosted PostgreSQL Monitoring — Monitoring PostgreSQL on your own Kubernetes or bare metal infrastructure.
• PostgreSQL Query Monitoring — Query history, workload trends, wait events, and deploy comparisons.