Monitoring

Any backup tool must be properly monitored to ensure backups are correctly performed.

pghoard provides several ways to monitor it.

Note

In addition to monitoring, the restore process should be tested regularly

Alert files

Alert files are created whenever an error condition that requires human intervention to solve. You’re recommended to add checks for the existence of these files to your alerting system.

authentication_error

There has been a problem in the authentication of at least one of the PostgreSQL connections. This usually denotes a wrong username and/or password.

configuration_error

There has been a problem in the authentication of at least one of the PostgreSQL connections. This usually denotes a missing pg_hba.conf entry or incompatible settings in postgresql.conf.

upload_retries_warning

Upload of a file has failed more times than :upload_retries_warning_limit:. Needs human intervention to figure out why and to delete the alert once the situation has been fixed.

version_mismatch_error

Your local PostgreSQL client versions of pg_basebackup or pg_receivewal (formerly pg_receive_xlog) do not match with the servers PostgreSQL version. You need to update them to be on the same version level.

version_unsupported_error

Server PostgreSQL version is not supported.

Metrics

You can configure pghoard to send metrics to an external system. Supported systems are described in Logging configuration.

FIXME: describe the different metrics and what kind of alert to trigger based on them.