dbhealth

Monitor your database's health. Is it serving? How close is it to its limits? Are its tables current? One container, one connection string, answers every minute in control, Prometheus, Datadog, or anything that speaks OpenTelemetry.

Quick start

docker run -d --name dbhealth \
  -e DBHEALTH_DSN='postgres://user:password@pg.internal:5432/billing' \
  -e DBHEALTH_KEY='sfc_...' \
  turbolytics/dbhealth

DBHEALTH_KEY is your org's credential from control. A minute later control shows billing: serving, 3 ms; 18 of 100 connections; 2.1 GB; public.events newest row 12 s ago, 48,213,904 rows.

No control yet? Point it at your own tools instead:

docker run -d -p 8000:8000 \
  -e DBHEALTH_DSN='postgres://user:password@pg.internal:5432/billing' \
  -e DBHEALTH_METRICS=prometheus \
  turbolytics/dbhealth

curl -s localhost:8000/metrics | grep dbhealth_probe_ok
dbhealth_probe_ok{db="billing"} 1

-e DBHEALTH_METRICS=otlp -e DBHEALTH_OTLP=http://datadog-agent:4318 pushes the same to the Datadog agent, Grafana Alloy, or any OpenTelemetry collector. /healthz is on the same port for your supervisor.

What you get

Facts, every minute, per database. Control, Prometheus and OTLP carry the same names; StatsD the same with dots.

Every series carries db. A field the database could not give is absent, not zero: a role without pg_read_all_stats gets an error naming the grant, not a connection count that is wrong. A _per_second rate is the interval's, from the database's own counters two readings apart; the first interval after a start or a stats reset sends none. Query text is never read.

What it costs the database: one SELECT 1, seven catalog reads, and per table one estimate and one max(), every interval. count(*) only where you ask, once an hour. load: {enabled: false} drops two of the reads.

Config

The quick start is the defaults: every table, up to 50, probed once a minute, rows estimated. A file is the same with more than one database, chosen tables, or exact counts:

databases:
  - kind: postgres
    dsn: "{{ DBHEALTH_PRIMARY_DSN }}"   # from the environment; control sees host:port/db only
    name: billing-primary
    cluster: billing
  - kind: postgres
    dsn: "{{ DBHEALTH_REPLICA_A_DSN }}"
    name: billing-replica-a
    cluster: billing

probe:
  interval_seconds: 60
  timeout_seconds: 5

tables:
  discover:                           # every table in these schemas, up to max_tables
    schemas: [public]
    exclude: ["sqlflow_*", "*_tmp"]
    freshness_columns: [bucket, minute, ts, created_at, updated_at]   # the first one a table has; event time before write time
    max_tables: 50
  # static:                           # or name them, so a schema change cannot add
  #   - name: public.usage_per_minute #   a two-billion-row table by accident
  #     freshness_column: minute
  #     rows: exact
  rows: estimate                      # estimate (free) or exact (count(*), once an hour)
  freshness_interval_seconds: 60
  rows_exact_interval_seconds: 3600

load:
  enabled: true                       # sessions and rates; two catalog reads an interval

report:
  to: https://ingest.turbolytics.io/v1/turbostats
  credential: "{{ TURBOSTATS_CREDENTIAL }}"
  # metrics: prometheus               # /metrics and /healthz on :8000
  # metrics: otlp                     # or pushed every interval
  # otlp: http://collector:4318
  # statsd: localhost:8125

dbhealth validate -c dbhealth.yml     # ok: 2 databases
dbhealth run -c dbhealth.yml

Each replica is its own entry: a primary that answers says nothing about the replica your application reads from. cluster groups them in control.

A partitioned table is one table: discovery lists the parent and skips its partitions, and the parent reports the sum of its partitions' rows, size, scans and writes, with the newest vacuum of any of them. A table partitioned by day stays one entry in max_tables however many days it holds. A dropped partition takes its counters with it, so the parent sends no write or scan rates for that interval.

The connection string never leaves the process. What is sent is host:port/database.

Build it yourself

make build && ./bin/dbhealth version
make test-short            # unit, no Docker
make test-integration      # against postgres:18 in testcontainers
make release-test          # the image, run against Postgres