How We Reduced Performance Tuning Time by Orders of Magnitude with Database Observability

Doing performance tuning on a massively distributed database is never an easy task. This is especially true for TiDB, an open-source, cloud-native NewSQL database for elastic scale and real-time analytics, because it consists of multiple components and each component has plenty of metrics.

Like many distributed systems, TiDB uses Prometheus to store the monitoring and performance metrics and Grafana to visualize these metrics. Thanks to these two open source projects, it is easy for TiDB developers to add monitoring and performance metrics. However, as the metrics increase, the learning curve becomes steeper for TiDB users to gain performance insights. In this talk, we will share how we measure latency in a distributed system using a top-down (holistic) approach, and why we introduced "tuning by database time" and "tuning by color" into TiDB. The new methodologies and Grafana dashboard help reduce the time and the requirement of expertise in performance tuning by orders of magnitude.