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Monitor PgBouncer

This how-to configures pgwatch to scrape a PgBouncer connection pooler alongside your PostgreSQL databases.

For background, see Advanced features → Connection poolers.

Prerequisites

  • A running PgBouncer instance with its stats_users configured to allow the monitoring user to run SHOW STATS.
  • A PgBouncer monitoring user with read-only access to the pooler admin console.

Steps

  1. Add a source of kind pgbouncer whose conn_str points at PgBouncer's port:

    - name: pgbouncer-prod
  kind: pgbouncer
  conn_str: postgresql://pgwatch:secret@pgbouncer1:6432/pgbouncer
  preset_metrics: pgbouncer
  is_enabled: true

  2. Set the DB Name field on the source to the pool name you want to monitor. Leave it empty to track all pools in the instance — individual pools will then be distinguished by a database tag on every measurement.

    Do not put pgbouncer in the DB Name field. That special database provides the statistics, but it is not a real pool.

  3. Wait for the next refresh cycle (default 120 seconds) and verify pgwatch is collecting metrics:

    curl -H "Token: $TOKEN" http://localhost:8080/source/pgbouncer-prod/metric

  4. Import the PgBouncer Grafana dashboard from the grafana/ directory of the pgwatch repo and point it at the metrics data source for this source.

See also