Documentation & PostgreSQL Audit Guides
Practical guides to audit, diagnose, and monitor PostgreSQL: slow queries, locks, anomalies, and real-time KPIs.
Getting started: installing PWR step by step
The concrete installation guide: required PostgreSQL extensions, creating the perfhist schema, the two connection modes (Direct or Agent), the Collector ↔ SaaS flow, and the full collector installation at the client site.
How the Collector communicates with PWR: the Startup, PULL and PUSH flows
Three detailed sequence diagrams to understand exactly how the Collector starts up, how PWR fetches reports on demand (PULL), and how the Collector reports its heartbeats and snapshots (PUSH) — and why your PostgreSQL database stays isolated in all three cases.
The PWR report explained in detail: PostgreSQL's AWR, section by section
A complete guided tour of the PWR report (the AWR equivalent for PostgreSQL): live banner, snapshot comparison, KPI trends, costly queries, per-query history, locks and automatic recommendations.
How to diagnose a PostgreSQL incident in under 5 minutes (real case)
A real PostgreSQL diagnosis case: by comparing two snapshots, we identify a faulty query and resolve the incident in under 5 minutes.
How PWR detects a lock in PostgreSQL
ASH analysis, snapshots, explicit locks and transactional blocking: a real PostgreSQL lock case, from the reproduction scenario to PWR's LOCK-LEVEL and SESSION-LEVEL detection, through to the automatic recommendations.
Comparing two before/after snapshots
Isolate the real impact of a deployment, a migration or a load spike by comparing two snapshots of your database.
Smart monitoring: how PWR detects PostgreSQL incidents before your users do
How PWR watches your database continuously, tells a simple passing spike apart from a real incident, and automatically alerts your team by email before your users even complain.
Live Health Banner: precise definition of every real-time indicator
Load, Connections Used, P95 Latency, transactional throughput and error rate, blocked sessions, wait events, cache hit, slow queries: exactly what each Live Health Banner indicator measures, its color thresholds and its weight in the Health Score.
Agent mode: how PWR talks to the Collector, securely
A simple explanation of what happens when you choose the local Collector connection: why a dedicated token (X-Collector-Token) rather than your usual login, and how PWR always knows who is talking to it — you, or the agent installed at your site.
Security & access: what PWR can and cannot do
A clear overview of PWR's access model: read-only, schema-based isolation, and on-demand purge.
PostgreSQL slow queries: causes, detection and fixes
Why a PostgreSQL query becomes slow, how to detect it with pg_stat_statements and EXPLAIN ANALYZE, and how PWR automatically identifies it as soon as it drifts.
pg_stat_statements explained: how it works, its limits, and what PWR adds
How the pg_stat_statements extension works, its essential columns, its concrete limits (no history, no execution plans), and what PWR adds on top for a complete diagnosis.
PostgreSQL monitoring: the essential metrics to watch
CPU load, IO and cache hit ratio, connections, locks, a single health score: the PostgreSQL metrics that really matter, and how they compare to Oracle's AWR.
PostgreSQL checklist: 20 points to check for performance
A concrete 20-point checklist for auditing the performance of a PostgreSQL instance: indexes, vacuum, autovacuum, statistics and workload.
How to read a PWR report in PostgreSQL: a complete performance analysis guide
How to read a PostgreSQL PWR report section by section: overall summary, expensive queries, disk I/O, locks, cache, wait events, trends — and above all how to recognize a PostgreSQL database in distress.
How to change the frequency and retention period of PostgreSQL snapshots (PWR)?
The PostgreSQL equivalent of Oracle's dbms_workload_repository.modify_snapshot_settings: how to check and change PWR's snapshot capture frequency and retention duration, in Direct mode (interface) as well as Agent mode (the Collector's config/.env file).
PostgreSQL Smart Optimizer: how analyzing your real workload automatically configures your database
How PWR's Tuning Advisor works: 30 days of real metrics analyzed to automatically recommend the 7 most decisive PostgreSQL parameters (shared_buffers, work_mem, effective_cache_size, max_connections, maintenance_work_mem, random_page_cost, wal_buffers), with formula, SQL code, severity and confidence score for each.
PostgreSQL Index Tuning Advisor: detect, prioritize and track index optimizations by table and by query
How PWR's Index Tuning Advisor works: analyzing pg_stat_user_tables and pg_stat_statements to compute a per-table risk score (sequential scans, volume, DML activity, dead tuples, maintenance), generate prioritized recommendations and track their impact after index creation.