pgsql and net-snmp - Mailing list pgsql-admin

Hello,

**** I really should ask if i am mailing to the correct mailing list in regarding the question i will ask.
**** But ...

I am working for a  small company  offering IT services.
We are in  the acceptance stage  for a  migration of an old UNIX app managing a huge load of data.

This acceptance environment is using a VMWARE ESX platform, a jboss as application server ( java servlet as client application )
and a pgsql database. As the developpers knew there will be a lot of data, the server specs are quite high...
( on RAM space for instance... jboss + pgsql on the same server ).

As it is ... this environement gets poor results ...

This could be a lot of things and as i am charged of the applications monitoring....

How-to monitor pgsql ?
( considering the server's general statistics and events are already covered :
cpu usage, memory usage,  shutdown and reboot events, unplanned down time )

- i have got a net-snmp at service
- i have got an event listener too ( traplistener + event-rules)

After looking through the pgsql manual and google ...
- i want base info on the pgsql processes: cpu usage, memory usage and so on... 
- i want base healthiness information on the database

lets get to pgsql...

- base processes information:
-------------------------------------
As i have understood it pgsql runs as as a single process and forks itself for each clients that connects to the database.
As i have seen the number of starting processes is set into pgsql.
( when there is no connection to the server i see six process postgres in idle mode )
The pgsql client processes names are giving informations on themselves:

using egrep and ps:
   #ps aux | egrep ".*postgres: .* .*:ffff:.*\..*\..*\..*:.*"
   returns a list of pgsqlclient processes

net-snmp ?
   as i look into monitoring pgsql client processes i have written a shell/awk script returning little data on those.
   #./pgsql.cli.mon
   $ [ number of processes ]
   $ [ min cpu usage % ]
   $ [ average cpu usage % ]
   $ [ max cpu usage % ]
   $ [ min mem usage % ]
   $ [ average mem usage % ]
   $ [ max mem usage % ]
   $ [ min  virtual mem  ]
   $ [ average virtual mem ]
   $ [ max virtual mem ]
   $ [ min real mem ]
   $ [ average real mem ]
   $ [ max real mem ]
   and by feeding it into snmpd.conf (exec statement) i get those data  through snmp
 
The maximum and minimum number of processes allowed are already managed by the net-snmp base agent.

*** That is a real tiny base for some performance testing.
*** The script should be rewritten in an other language ( perl ):
***    making sums and averages of doubles in shell lead me ( as too often... ) use pipes and awk....
 

- database healthiness ?
------------------------------
For that part i have only google'd  and looked into the pgsql manual (  and extracted a "SELECT * from pg_stats" from pgsql ).
I could use an extraction script that maps selected data into snmp ( as a have done for the processes informations ).
But using such a way to pack pgsql's pg_stats into snmp will include regular query to this table.

Is there any performance issues generated by this type of monitoring ?



As  i have not found any pgsql monitoring agent using snmp (yet) ,  i am trying to gather any data concerning pgsql and feed it to snmp.
But i always feel like i have not looked enough for anything.

Is there any snmp agent, for pgsql ? If i gather statistics from pg_stats, is there any values/properties, specific to pgsql that i should look into  ?