DBtune agent

The DBtune agent is a lightweight, extensible monitoring and configuration management tool for PostgreSQL databases. It collects system metrics, database performance data, and manages database configurations through a centralized DBtune software as a service.

PostgreSQL providers supported

• PostgreSQL - docs, config
• AWS Aurora PostgreSQL - docs, config
• AWS RDS PostgreSQL - docs, config
• Google Cloud SQL - docs, config
• Aiven - docs, config
• Azure Flexible Server - docs, config
• CloudNativePG - docs, config

Quick start

You can use the binary or our docker image to run the dbtune-agent. Configuration is done with a dbtune.yaml and is required for running. See here for more advanced deployment options

[!IMPORTANT] Please check the relevant documentation page for your provider for the pre-requisites required for dbtune-agent to operate properly.

Docker

docker pull --platform linux/amd64 public.ecr.aws/dbtune/dbtune/agent:latest

# Run with a dbtune.yaml
docker run \
    -v $(pwd)/dbtune.yaml:/app/dbtune.yaml \
    --name dbtune-agent \
    public.ecr.aws/dbtune/dbtune/agent:latest
        
# OR... run with environment variables.
docker run \
    -e DBT_POSTGRESQL_CONNECTION_URL=postgresql://user:password@localhost:5432/database \
    -e DBT_DBTUNE_SERVER_URL=https://app.dbtune.com \
    -e DBT_DBTUNE_API_KEY=your-api-key \
    -e DBT_DBTUNE_DATABASE_ID=your-database-id \
    -e DBT_POSTGRESQL_INCLUDE_QUERIES=true \
    public.ecr.aws/dbtune/dbtune/agent:latest

Binary

You can use the one-liner below to fetch the latest binary for your system, from our releases page.

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dbtuneai/dbtune-agent/refs/heads/main/setup.sh > /tmp/dbtune-agent.sh && sh /tmp/dbtune-agent.sh
./dbtune-agent

Alternatively, you can build from source.

You can further deploy this as a systemd service.

Configuration

Configuration can be done via a dbtune.yaml file, which is looked up in the following places, ordered by priority:

• /etc/dbtune.yaml
• /etc/dbtune/dbtune.yaml
• ./dbtune.yaml (Relative to the path from which dbtune-agent was executed)

Each PostgreSQL provider has different configuration options, so please refer to their specific configuration options. Please also take note of any pre-requisites required for the dbtune-agent to be able to read system metrics.

The shared options for the dbtune.yaml are listed below:

# dbtune.yaml
postgresql:
  connection_url: postgresql://user:password@localhost:5432/database # Connection url to your database
  include_queries: true # Whether to include place-holdered query text when transmitting to DBtune.
                        # This is provided so that you can identify you queries by their text.
                        # DBtune does not require this info, and will instead display query ids
                        # if this is disabled.

# Optional
guardrail_settings:
  memory_threshold: 90  # The percentage at which the dbtune-agent triggers a memory gaurdrail
                        # DBtune will act to prevent an OOM if this threshold is reached
                        # during tuning.
dbtune:
  server_url: https://app.dbtune.com
  api_key:  "" # Provided when you create a database on DBtune
  database_id: "" # Provided when you create a database on DBtune

debug: false

The shared options for environment variables are listed below:

export DBT_DBTUNE_SERVER_URL="https://app.dbtune.com"
export DBT_DBTUNE_API_KEY=""
export DBT_DBTUNE_DATABASE_ID=""
export DBT_POSTGRESQL_INCLUDE_QUERIES=true

# Your database specific
export DBT_POSTGRESQL_CONNECTION_URL=postgresql://user:password@localhost:5432/database 

Advanced deployments

Build from source

To build the DBtune agent from source, you'll need Go 1.23.1 or later installed on your system.

git clone https://github.com/dbtuneai/dbtune-agent.git
cd dbtune-agent

# Download dependencies and build
go mod download
go build -o dbtune-agent ./cmd/agent.go

Systemd

Create a systemd service with the following config and save it as /etc/systemd/system/dbtune-agent.service.

[Unit]
Description=DBtune agent
After=network.target

[Service]
User=dbtune   # User that runs the dbtune-agent, can be root
Group=dbtune  # Group to run the dbtune-agent with
WorkingDirectory=/usr/local/bin
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/dbtune-agent
Restart=always
RestartSec=5s
StandardOutput=journal
StandardError=journal

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Make sure the user and group that you specify in the systemd service has rights to access postgres data files and also is allowed to use sudo without a password to do a systemd restart of the postgresql service e.g. sudo systemctl restart postgres.

Reload the unit files and enable the dbtune-agent.service:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now dbtune-agent

Once started you can check and verify that the dbtune-agent is running by looking at the journal, for example: journalctl -u dbtune-agent -f

AWS Fargate / ECS

Follow these README instructions to run the agent under AWS Fargate as a service.

Metric collection

The agent collects essential metrics required for DBtune's optimization engine, you can find more information about the metrics here.

How to contribute

• Fork the repo and create a new branch
• Then make a PR to the main branch

Getting help

• Check our documentation
• Email support: support at dbtune.com

License

See github.com/dbtuneai/agent//blob/main/LICENSE