What’s new in PoWA 4.0.0

April, 8, 2020

New remote mode

The new remote mode is the biggest feature introduced in PoWA 4, though there have been other improvements.

With this new mode you can now store the metrics from the various datasources (pg_stat_statements, pg_stat_kcache and any other) on a different PostgreSQL server. You can therefore use PoWA without provisionning extra disk space on your production instances, or spend any other resource for the data collection as it’s all done on a different server. Thanks to this mode it’s also now possible to use PoWA with read-only physical replication standby servers. And finally with this new mode you can also store the PoWA metrics from any number of PostgreSQL servers in a single place and access everything using the same web interface.

A new dedicated daemon called powa-collector is provided to take retrieve the various PoWA metrics from all the instances and store them on the wanted server.

A lot of other enhancements

As for any other new PoWA versions, a lot of other things have been improved.

This versions adds compatibility with the PostgreSQL 13 and with the new metrics added in pg_stat_kcache 2.1.0 and pg_qualstats 2.0.0.

The web interface has a new page to show all the remote servers for which PoWA is storing data and inspect any of them. It also adds new widgets for pg_track_settings, showing any detected configuration changes or server restarts as events on the varioius graphs. Multiple other graphs have been added and all the graphs get in-app metrics documentation, with optional link to some documentation when needed.

Documentation