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Quick start guide

Get PostgresAI monitoring running in minutes with PostgresAI Cloud.

Step 1: Choose your plan​

Go to console.postgres.ai and navigate to Checkup → Monitoring instances → Choose plan.

Plans page

Select a plan based on your needs:

  • Starter ($128/mo) — Full monitoring stack for small production databases
  • Scale ($512/mo) — 6-month retention, trend analysis, 1 business day SLA
  • Enterprise — Dedicated support, Kubernetes & Terraform, custom workflows

Step 2: Select deployment method​

After selecting a plan, choose how to connect your database:

Scale deployment options

Hosted by PostgresAI:

  • Any PostgreSQL database — We provision and manage the monitoring stack for you
  • Your Supabase projects — One-click integration with connected Supabase projects

Self-hosted:

  • Your cloud account (BYOC) — Provision in your AWS, GCP, or Azure
  • Your server (BYOM) — Install on existing Linux machine with Docker
  • Kubernetes — Deploy via Helm chart

Step 3: Connect your database​

Option A: Supabase integration​

If you have Supabase projects, select them for automatic setup:

Supabase project selection

PostgresAI automatically:

  • Creates a dedicated monitoring user in your Supabase database
  • Deploys the monitoring stack
  • No manual setup required

Option B: Any PostgreSQL database​

For other PostgreSQL databases (RDS, CloudSQL, self-hosted):

Any PostgreSQL connection

  1. Enter your database connection URL
  2. Choose automatic or manual database preparation
  3. Click Test Connection to verify connectivity
  4. Deploy the monitoring stack
Database preparation

For automatic setup, provide superuser credentials (used once, never stored). For manual setup, follow the database preparation guide.

Step 4: Access your dashboards​

Once deployed, you'll receive:

  • Grafana URL with your dashboards
  • Login credentials

Start with 01. Node overview for a high-level health check.

Verify database permissions​

The monitoring user has read-only access to metadata only. To review the exact SQL statements used to create the monitoring role:

npx postgresai@latest prepare-db --print-sql

This shows all grant statements and confirms the minimal, read-only nature of the permissions.

What data is collected?​

Only database metadata is collected — no actual data or query parameters:

  • Query statistics from pg_stat_statements (normalized queries only)
  • Wait events and session information
  • Table and index statistics
  • Replication status

To review exactly what metrics are collected, examine the metric definitions:

See data privacy details.

First dashboard walkthrough​

Key panels to check in 01. Node overview:

  1. Active session history (ASH) — Wait events over time (similar to RDS Performance Insights)
  2. Sessions — Active, idle, and idle in transaction connections
  3. TPS — Transactions per second
  4. QPS — Queries per second

Decision tree: which dashboard to use?​

Is there an ongoing incident?
├─ Yes — Start with "01. Node Overview" for quick triage
│        └─ High wait events? — "04. Wait Events" for deep-dive
│        └─ Slow queries? — "02. Query Analysis" then "03. Single Query"
│        └─ Lock contention? — "13. Lock Contention"
│
├─ No, routine monitoring
│   ├─ Query performance review — "02. Query Analysis"
│   ├─ Index health check — "10. Index Health"
│   ├─ Table bloat check — "07. Autovacuum" or "08. Table Stats"
│   └─ Replication lag — "06. Replication"

Self-hosted alternative​

If you prefer to run the monitoring stack on your own infrastructure:

MethodBest for
Cloud databasesRDS, CloudSQL, Supabase specifics
HelmKubernetes production
Docker ComposeDevelopment, small deployments
CLI (npx)Quick local setup, demos

Next steps​