Seeking Advice: PostgreSQL Performance Troubleshooting Without Third-Party Tools - Mailing list pgsql-admin

Hi Team,

We are currently working on a migration project from DB2 to PostgreSQL. Post-migration, we’re observing several performance issues such as long-running queries and occasional instance crashes. It also appears that some application-side workloads may not be optimized for PostgreSQL.

From a DBA perspective, I’m looking to proactively identify problem areas—such as:

  • Long-running queries
  • Jobs/stored procedures consuming high temp space
  • Queries resulting in sequential scans due to missing indexes
  • Lock waits, deadlocks, and memory-heavy operations

We already have key parameters enabled (pg_stat_statements, pg_buffercache, etc.), and PostgreSQL is generating logs in .csv format. However, the main challenge is efficiently analyzing these logs and identifying performance bottlenecks at scale (databases ranging from ~1TB to 15TB).

We currently don’t have third-party monitoring tools like Datadog, so I’m looking for recommendations on free or lightweight tools and best practices to:

  • Parse and analyze PostgreSQL logs (especially CSV logs)
  • Identify top resource-consuming queries and patterns
  • Correlate temp usage, memory pressure, and query behavior
  • Generate actionable insights for the engineering team

Any suggestions on tools, scripts, or approaches that have worked well in similar large-scale environments would be greatly appreciated.

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