pg_activity is a great command-line tool for PostgreSQL server activity monitoring., and we are gonna show you how to install it and use it on a Linux machine. But what happens when someone that doesn’t have access to that Linux machine, wants to monitor the Postgre activity?
Well, you have several options available, you can use a python script on the server and share the information publicly available as a flask app, or, and this is what we are going to be overviewing in this article, you can use the built-in functionality of Pg_Admin.
pg_activity
As you may already know, pg_activity is a command tool for PostgreSQL server activity monitoring.
![pg_activity pg_activity](https://i0.wp.com/pcx3.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/pg_activity_11.png?resize=736%2C371&ssl=1)
To install it you have to install the package psycopg2
from pgdg
APT or YUM repositories. psycopg2
can also been installed from pip
with pip install psycopg2
or pip install psycopg2-binary
for the binary version.
After downloading and extracting the zip archive from github, you can do
sudo python setup.py install
to install the pg_activity tool.
Once the tool is installed you can access it by running:
sudo -u postgres pg_activity -U postgres
pgAdmin + adminpack
You can also use pgAdmin to get a quick view of what is going on in the database. For better control, you need to install the adminpack
extension in the destination database, by issuing this command:
CREATE EXTENSION adminpack;
This extension is a part of the additionally supplied modules of PostgreSQL. It provides several administration functions that PgAdmin can use in order to manage, control, and monitor a Postgres server from a remote location.
Once you have installed adminpack
, connect to the database server; this will open a window similar to that shown in the following screenshot, reporting a general view plus information on connections, locks, and running transactions:
![pgAdmin + adminpack pgAdmin + adminpack](https://i0.wp.com/pcx3.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/03.png?resize=724%2C793&ssl=1)