pgcenter record is the first tool from "Poor man's monitoring" which collect metrics from Postgres to local files.
pgcenter record can be used in cases when no monitoring is available, but there is a need to collect Postgres performance statistics over time. It can also be used as an ad-hoc statistics collecting tool when there is a need in gathering statistics over short period of time for purposes of later analysis, for example collecting stats at benchmarking.
pgcenter record connects to Postgres, reads stats and writes this information into JSON files into a tar archive. File names contain name of statistics view and timestamp when stats have been recorded. Hence, it's possible to unpack statistics using tar. Once unpacked, stats can be used in any way required.
For reading and building of various different reports there is an alternative tool: pgcenter report. See details here.
- continuous recording of statistics into JSON files packed into tar file;
- recording of statistics with specified interval or specified number of times;
- oneshot mode - record single snapshot of statistics and append it into an existing file.
pgcenter record doesn't support recording of system statistics, but if you are interested in such tool, take a look at sar utility from sysstat package.
Run record command to connect to Postgres, poll statistics and continuously save to a local file:
pgcenter record -f /tmp/stats.tar -U postgres production_db
See other usage examples here.