This utility permits users to perform replication health monitoring and automatic failover on a replication topology consisting of a master and its slaves. The utility is designed to run interactively or continuously refreshing the health information at periodic intervals. Its primary mission is to monitor the master for failure and when a failure occurs, execute failover to the best slave available. The utility accepts a list of slaves to be considered the candidate slave.

This utility is designed to work exclusively for servers that support global transaction identifiers (GTIDs) and have GTID_MODE=ON. MySQL server versions 5.6.9 and higher support GTIDs. See the MySQL server online reference manual for more information about setting up replication with GTIDs enabled.

The user can specify the interval in seconds to use for detecting the master status and generating the health report using the --interval option. At each interval, the utility will check to see if the server is alive via a ping operation followed by a check of the connector to detect if the server is still reachable. The ping operation can be controlled with the --ping option (see below).

If the master is found to be offline or unreachable, the utility will execute one of the following actions based on the value of the --failover-mode option.

auto Execute automatic failover to the list of candidates first and if no slaves are viable, continue to locate a viable candidate from the list of slaves. If no slaves are found to be a viable candidate, the utility will generate and error and exit.

Once a candidate is found, the utility will conduct failover to the best slave. The command will test each candidate slave listed for the prerequisites. Once a candidate slave is elected, it is made a slave of each of the other slaves thereby collecting any transactions executed on other slaves but not the candidate. In this way, the candidate becomes the most up-to-date slave.

elect This mode is the same as auto except if no candidates specified in the list of candidate slaves are viable, it does not check the remaining slaves and generates and error and exits.

fail This mode produces an error and does not failover when the master is downed. This mode is used to provide periodic health monitoring without the failover action taken.

For all options that permit specifying multiple servers, the options require a comma-separated list of connection parameters in the following form (where the password, port, and socket are optional).:

<*user*>[:<*passwd*>]@<*host*>[:<*port*>][:<*socket*>] or
<*login-path*>[:<*port*>][:<*socket*>]

The utility permits users to discover slaves connected to the master. In order to use the discover slaves feature, all slaves must use the --report-host and --report-port startup variables to specify the correct hostname and ip port of the slave. If these are missing or report the incorrect information, the slaves health may not be reported correctly or the slave may not be listed at all. The discover slaves feature ignores any slaves it cannot connect to.

The discover slaves feature is run automatically on each interval.

The utility permits the user to specify an external script to execute before and after the switchover and failover commands. The user can specify these with the --exec-before and --exec-after options. The return code of the script is used to determine success thus each script must report 0 (success) to be considered successful. If a script returns a value other than 0, the result code is presented in an error message.

The utility also permits the user to specify a script to be used for detecting a downed master or an application-level event to trigger failover. This can be specified using the --exec-fail-check option. The return code for the script is used to invoke failover. A return code of 0 indicates failover should not take place. A return code other than 0 indicates failover should take place. This is checked at the start of each interval if a script is supplied. The timeout option is not used in this case and the script is run once at the start of each interval.

The utility permits the user to log all actions taken during the commands. The --log option requires a valid path and file name of the file to use for logging operations. The log is active only when this option is specified. The option --log-age specifies the age in days that log entries are kept. The default is seven (7) days. Older entries are automatically deleted from the log file (but only if the --log option is specified).

The format of the log file includes the date and time of the event, the level of the event (informational - INFO, warning - WARN, error - ERROR, critical failure - CRITICAL), and the message reported by the utility.

The interface provides the user with a number of options for displaying additional information. The user can choose to see the replication health report (default), or choose to see the list of GTIDs in use, the UUIDs in use, and if logging is enabled the contents of the log file. Each of these reports is described below.

health Display the replication health of the topology. This report is the default view for the interface. By default, this includes the host name, port, role (MASTER or SLAVE) of the server, state of the server (UP = is connected, WARN = not connected but can ping, DOWN = not connected and cannot ping), the GTID_MODE, and health state.

The master health state is based on the following; if GTID_MODE=ON, the server must have binary log enabled, and there must exist a user with the REPLICATE SLAVE privilege.

The slave health state is based on the following; the IO_THREAD and SQL_THREADS must be running, it must be connected to the master, there are no errors, the slave delay for non-gtid enabled scenarios is not more than the threshold provided by the --max-position and the slave is reading the correct master log file, and slave delay is not more than the --seconds-behind threshold option.

At each interval, if the discover slaves option was specified at startup and new slaves are discovered, the health report is refreshed.

gtid: Display the master's list of executed GTIDs, contents of the GTID variables; @@GLOBAL.GTID_EXECUTED, @@GLOBAL.GTID_PURGED, and @@GLOBAL.GTID_OWNED. Thus, the user can toggle through four screens by pressing the 'G' key repeatedly. The display will cycle through all four screens restarting after the fourth screen.

UUID: Display universally unique identifiers (UUIDs) for all servers.

Log: This option is visible only if the --log option is specified. Show the contents of the log file. This can be helpful to see at a later time when failover occurred and the actions or messages recorded at the time.

The user interface is designed to match the size of the terminal window in which it is run. A refresh option is provided to permit users to resize their terminal windows or refresh the display at any time. However, the interface will automatically resize to the terminal window on each interval.

The interface will display the name of the utility, the master's status including binary log file, position, and filters as well as the date and time of the next interval event.

The interface will also permit the user to scroll up or down through a list longer than what the terminal window permits. When a long list is presented, the scroll options become enabled. The user can scroll the list up with the up arrow key and down with the down arrow key.

Use the --verbose option to see additional information in the health report and additional messages during failover.

OPTIONS

mysqlfailover accepts the following command-line options:

NOTES

The login user must have the appropriate permissions to execute SHOW SLAVE STATUS, SHOW MASTER STATUS, and SHOW VARIABLES on the appropriate servers as well as grant the REPLICATE SLAVE privilege. The utility checks permissions for the master, slaves, and candidates at startup.

At startup, the console will attempt to register itself with the master. If another console is already registered, and the failover mode is auto or elect, the console will be blocked from running failover. When a console quits, it deregisters itself from the master. If this process is broken, the user may override the registration check by using the --force option.

Mixing IP and hostnames is not recommended. The replication-specific utilities will attempt to compare hostnames and IP addresses as aliases for checking slave connectivity to the master. However, if your installation does not support reverse name lookup, the comparison could fail. Without the ability to do a reverse name lookup, the replication utilities could report a false negative that the slave is (not) connected to the master.

For example, if you setup replication using MASTER_HOST=ubuntu.net on the slave and later connect to the slave with mysqlrplcheck and have the master specified as --master=192.168.0.6 using the valid IP address for ubuntu.net, you must have the ability to do a reverse name lookup to compare the IP (192.168.0.6) and the hostname (ubuntu.net) to determine if they are the same machine.

Similarly, in order to avoid issues mixing local IP '127.0.0.1' with 'localhost', all the addresses '127.0.0.1' will be internally converted to 'localhost' by the utility. Nevertheless, It is best to use the actual hostname of the master when connecting or setting up replication.

The utility will check to see if the slaves are using the option --master-info-repository=TABLE. If they are not, the utility will stop with an error.

The path to the MySQL client tools should be included in the PATH environment variable in order to use the authentication mechanism with login-paths. This will allow the utility to use the my_print_defaults tools which is required to read the login-path values from the login configuration file (.mylogin.cnf).

EXAMPLES

To launch the utility, you must specify at a minimum the --master option and either the --discover-slaves-login option or the --slaves option. The option: option can be used in conjunction with the --slaves option to specify a list of known slaves (or slaves that do not report their host and ip) and to discover any other slaves connected to the master.

An example of the user interface and some of the report views are shown in the following examples.

The default interface will display the replication health report like the following. In this example the log file is enabled. A sample startup command is shown below:

$ mysqlfailover --master=root@localhost:3331 --discover-slaves-login=root --log=log.txt

MySQL Replication Monitor and Failover Utility
Failover Mode = auto     Next Interval = Mon Mar 19 15:56:03 2012

Master Information
------------------
Binary Log File   Position  Binlog_Do_DB  Binlog_Ignore_DB
mysql-bin.000001  571

GTID Executed Set
2A67DE00-2DA1-11E2-A711-00764F2BE90F:1-7 [...] 

Replication Health Status
+------------+-------+---------+--------+------------+---------+
| host       | port  | role    | state  | gtid_mode  | health  |
+------------+-------+---------+--------+------------+---------+
| localhost  | 3331  | MASTER  | UP     | ON         | OK      |
| localhost  | 3332  | SLAVE   | UP     | ON         | OK      |
| localhost  | 3333  | SLAVE   | UP     | ON         | OK      |
| localhost  | 3334  | SLAVE   | UP     | ON         | OK      |
+------------+-------+---------+--------+------------+---------+
Q-quit R-refresh H-health G-GTID Lists U-UUIDs L-log entries

Pressing the 'q' key will exit the utility. Pressing the 'r' key will refresh the current display. Pressing the 'h' key will return to the replication health report.

If the user presses the 'g' key, the gtid report is shown like the following. The first page shown is the master's executed GTID set:

MySQL Replication Monitor and Failover Utility
Failover Mode = auto     Next Interval = Mon Mar 19 15:59:33 2012

Master Information
------------------
Binary Log File   Position  Binlog_Do_DB  Binlog_Ignore_DB
mysql-bin.000001  571

GTID Executed Set
2A67DE00-2DA1-11E2-A711-00764F2BE90F:1-7 [...]

Master GTID Executed Set
+-------------------------------------------+
| gtid                                      |
+-------------------------------------------+
| 2A67DE00-2DA1-11E2-A711-00764F2BE90F:1-7  |
| 5503D37E-2DB2-11E2-A781-8077D4C14B33:1-3  |
+-------------------------------------------+
 
Q-quit R-refresh H-health G-GTID Lists U-UUIDs L-log entries Up|Down-scroll

If the user continues to press the 'g' key, the display will cycle through the three gtid lists.

If the list is longer than the screen permits as shown in the example above, the scroll up and down help is also shown. In this case, if the user presses the down arrow, the list will scroll down.

If the user presses the 'u' key, the list of UUIDs used in the topology are shown.:

MySQL Replication Monitor and Failover Utility
Failover Mode = auto     Next Interval = Mon Mar 19 16:02:34 2012

Master Information
------------------
Binary Log File   Position  Binlog_Do_DB  Binlog_Ignore_DB
mysql-bin.000001  571

GTID Executed Set
2A67DE00-2DA1-11E2-A711-00764F2BE90F:1-7 [...] 

UUIDs
+------------+-------+---------+---------------------------------------+
| host       | port  | role    | uuid                                  |
+------------+-------+---------+---------------------------------------+
| localhost  | 3331  | MASTER  | 55c65a00-71fd-11e1-9f80-ac64ef85c961  |
| localhost  | 3332  | SLAVE   | 5dd30888-71fd-11e1-9f80-dc242138b7ec  |
| localhost  | 3333  | SLAVE   | 65ccbb38-71fd-11e1-9f80-bda8146bdb0a  |
| localhost  | 3334  | SLAVE   | 6dd6abf4-71fd-11e1-9f80-d406a0117519  |
+------------+-------+---------+---------------------------------------+
Q-quit R-refresh H-health G-GTID Lists U-UUIDs L-log entries

If, once the master is detected as down and failover mode is auto or elect and there are viable candidate slaves, the failover feature will engage automatically and the user will see the failover messages appear. When failover is complete, the interface returns to monitoring replication health after 5 seconds. The following shows an example of failover occurring.:

Failover starting...
# Candidate slave localhost:3332 will become the new master.
# Preparing candidate for failover.
# Creating replication user if it does not exist.
# Stopping slaves.
# Performing STOP on all slaves.
# Switching slaves to new master.
# Starting slaves.
# Performing START on all slaves.
# Checking slaves for errors.
# Failover complete.
# Discovering slaves for master at localhost:3332

Failover console will restart in 5 seconds.

After the failover event, the new topology is shown in the replication health report.:

MySQL Replication Monitor and Failover Utility
Failover Mode = auto     Next Interval = Mon Mar 19 16:05:12 2012

Master Information
------------------
Binary Log File   Position  Binlog_Do_DB  Binlog_Ignore_DB
mysql-bin.000001  1117

GTID Executed Set
2A67DE00-2DA1-11E2-A711-00764F2BE90F:1-7 [...] 

UUIDs
+------------+-------+---------+--------+------------+---------+
| host       | port  | role    | state  | gtid_mode  | health  |
+------------+-------+---------+--------+------------+---------+
| localhost  | 3332  | MASTER  | UP     | ON         | OK      |
| localhost  | 3333  | SLAVE   | UP     | ON         | OK      |
| localhost  | 3334  | SLAVE   | UP     | ON         | OK      |
+------------+-------+---------+--------+------------+---------+

Q-quit R-refresh H-health G-GTID Lists U-UUIDs L-log entries

If the user presses the 'l' key and the --log option was specified, the interface will show the entries in the log file. Note: example truncated for space allowance.:

MySQL Replication Monitor and Failover Utility
Failover Mode = auto     Next Interval = Mon Mar 19 16:06:13 2012

Master Information
------------------
Binary Log File   Position  Binlog_Do_DB  Binlog_Ignore_DB
mysql-bin.000001  1117

GTID Executed Set
2A67DE00-2DA1-11E2-A711-00764F2BE90F:1-7 [...] 

Log File
+-------------------------+----------------------------------------- ... --+
| Date                    | Entry                                    ...   |
+-------------------------+----------------------------------------- ... --+
| 2012-03-19 15:55:33 PM  | INFO Failover console started.           ...   |
| 2012-03-19 15:55:33 PM  | INFO Failover mode = auto.               ...   |
| 2012-03-19 15:55:33 PM  | INFO Getting health for master: localhos ...   |
| 2012-03-19 15:55:33 PM  | INFO Master status: binlog: mysql-bin.00 ...   |
+-------------------------+----------------------------------------- ... --+
Q-quit R-refresh H-health G-GTID Lists U-UUIDs L-log entries Up|Down-scroll\