Self-Hosted PostgreSQL Monitoring
Running PostgreSQL on your own infrastructure gives you full control — but that control comes with responsibility. MonPG gives you production-grade observability without surrendering your data to a third-party agent.
Why Self-Hosted PostgreSQL Needs Better Monitoring
When you manage your own PostgreSQL, you're responsible for everything the cloud providers handle for you: vacuum tuning, index optimization, connection pooling, replication health, WAL management, and capacity planning. A single misconfigured autovacuum threshold or a missing index can take your database from healthy to critical in hours.
Most teams cobble together Prometheus exporters, Grafana dashboards, and custom scripts. MonPG replaces that patchwork with a purpose-built PostgreSQL monitoring platform that understands the semantics of your database — not just raw metrics.
What MonPG Monitors on Self-Hosted PostgreSQL
- Query performance (pg_stat_statements): Every query tracked — calls, total/mean time, rows returned, block I/O, temp file usage. Historical trends show when queries start degrading, not just that they're slow now.
- Connection management: Active, idle, idle-in-transaction connections. Per-application connection tracking. Connection exhaustion prediction before you hit max_connections.
- Vacuum and autovacuum: Dead tuple accumulation, XID age approaching wraparound, autovacuum worker contention, table-level vacuum history. The vacuum advisor recommends specific settings per table.
- Replication health: Streaming replication lag (bytes and time), WAL sender/receiver status, slot retention, logical replication slot monitoring. Alerts on lag thresholds.
- WAL and checkpoint activity: WAL generation rate, checkpoint frequency and duration, full-page writes, archive lag. Essential for I/O planning and backup verification.
- Lock analysis: Real-time lock tree visualization, blocked queries, lock wait duration, deadlock detection and history.
- System metrics: CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network — correlated with PostgreSQL activity. See if a slow query is CPU-bound, I/O-bound, or waiting on locks.
- Log collection and analysis: Direct PostgreSQL log file collection (csvlog or stderr format). Pattern detection for errors, slow queries, connection issues, and authentication failures.
Deployment Options
The MonPG collector is a single binary that runs alongside your PostgreSQL. No extensions, no schema changes, no database restarts. Choose your deployment method:
- Docker container:
docker run -d monpg/collector— the fastest way to start - Kubernetes: Helm chart with configurable resource limits, readiness checks, and persistent state storage
- Standalone binary: Download for Linux (amd64/arm64) — no container runtime needed, runs on bare metal servers
- Systemd service: Install as a system service with automatic restart and log rotation
The collector connects to PostgreSQL using a read-only monitoring role (SELECT privileges on system views). It pushes metrics to the MonPG dashboard over TLS. Your database credentials never leave your network.
Multi-Instance and Multi-Datacenter Support
Running PostgreSQL across multiple servers, datacenters, or environments? A single MonPG collector can monitor multiple PostgreSQL instances. Or deploy one collector per datacenter for isolation. All instances appear in a unified dashboard with server grouping and per-database filtering.
This works whether your PostgreSQL runs on physical servers, VMware VMs, Proxmox containers, or any other on-premise infrastructure. MonPG also supports mixed environments — monitor your self-hosted databases alongside AWS RDS, Azure, or GCP Cloud SQL from the same dashboard.
Index Advisor with What-If Simulation
MonPG's index review analyzes query patterns, table statistics, and write cost before recommending an index. It uses what-if simulation to estimate likely plan impact before you create the index, and it flags unused indexes that waste disk space or slow down writes.
PgBouncer Monitoring
If you use PgBouncer for connection pooling (and you should on self-hosted PostgreSQL), MonPG monitors it alongside your database. Track pool utilization, client wait times, server connections, and pool saturation. Get alerted before your connection pool becomes a bottleneck.
How MonPG Compares to DIY Monitoring
| Feature | Prometheus + Grafana | MonPG |
|---|---|---|
| Setup time | Hours to days | 5 minutes |
| Query analysis | Metric snapshots with pg_stat_monitor | Plans, trends, regressions |
| Index recommendations | None | What-if simulation |
| Vacuum advisor | None | Per-table recommendations |
| Log analysis | Loki + custom parsing | Built-in with pattern detection |
| Operational checks | Custom alerts | 50+ risk signals |
| Maintenance | You maintain everything | Zero maintenance SaaS |
Related Resources
- How to Find and Fix Slow Queries — Complete guide to pg_stat_statements and EXPLAIN ANALYZE.
- PostgreSQL VACUUM Guide — Autovacuum tuning and XID wraparound prevention.
- Replication Monitoring Guide — Monitor streaming and logical replication on self-hosted PostgreSQL.
- PostgreSQL Query Monitoring — Query history, workload trends, wait events, and deploy comparisons.
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