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Monitoring backing services

If you use backing services provided by PaaS then you are likely to want to see information on their performance. We expose logs and metrics in the GOV.UK PaaS admin tool. For advanced users we can also export metrics to a Prometheus instance you run.

View backing service metrics

If you use the PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis or OpenSearch backing services, you can view metrics for those backing services in the GOV.UK PaaS admin tool.

When you create your backing service instance, you can access the service instance’s metrics with no extra work. Your backing service plan does not affect which metrics you can view. You can view metrics for any date range within the last year.

Backing services instances exist in a space within an org. You must be able to view a space in the GOV.UK PaaS admin tool to view metrics for backing service instances in that space.

  1. Sign into the GOV.UK PaaS admin tool for the London region or the Ireland region.
  2. Select the Organisation and Space.
  3. Select the Backing services tab and select your backing service.
  4. Select the Metrics tab.

Exporting backing service metrics to Prometheus

If you are an advanced user you may want to export backing service metrics into your own system. To help you do this we can export your backing service metrics in Prometheus format.

Postgres and MySQL metrics can be exported using the PaaS Prometheus exporter.

OpenSearch and Redis metrics can be exported on request. Please contact us at gov-uk-paas-support@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk

In theory it is possible to run Prometheus on the GOV.UK PaaS. By default Prometheus stores data on-disk, but our apps do not have persistent storage. Instead Prometheus can be configured to store data in our InfluxDB backing service. We have not tested this in production but would be eager to hear results.

Backing service logs

If you use the PostgreSQL or MySQL backing services, you can view logs for those backing services in the GOV.UK PaaS admin tool.

View backing service logs

  1. Sign into the GOV.UK PaaS admin tool for the London region or the Ireland region.
  2. Select the Organisation and Space.
  3. Select the Backing services tab and select your backing service.
  4. Select the Logs tab.
  5. To download the logs, click the name of the log file

These logs are provided directly by the backing service provider.

More about monitoring

To learn how to monitor your apps, see our documentation on monitoring apps.