About PMM API¶

PMM Server provides a comprehensive REST API that enables you to monitor databases, manage resources, collect metrics, and automate PMM operations programmatically. The API supports endpoints for managing nodes, services, agents, alerting, backups, and other PMM components.

The complete API documentation on Readme.io includes detailed endpoint specifications, authentication methods, example requests, and response schemas.

Interactive API documentation¶

You can explore and test the API using the built-in Swagger UI, accessible at the /swagger/ endpoint of your PMM Server. The Swagger interface allows you to:

browse available API endpoints
view detailed request and response schemas
execute API requests directly from the browser
test different parameters and see live responses

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Core API resources¶

The PMM API organizes resources into Nodes, Services and Agents.

Nodes¶

A Node represents a hosting environment where your services run and monitoring takes place. This can include bare metal servers, virtual machines, Docker containers, or cloud instances like Amazon RDS.

Each Node can:

host multiple Services and Agents
receive insights from zero or more Agents
be monitored independently of other components

Services¶

A Service represents a monitored database or application instance in your infrastructure. These include database systems like MySQL, MongoDB, Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, and other supported database types.

Services can:

run on zero nodes (serverless configurations)
run on a single node (standalone installations)
span multiple nodes (distributed systems like Percona XtraDB Cluster)
receive monitoring insights from multiple Agents

Agents¶

Agents are the monitoring components that:

collect metrics, query data, and system information
run on specific Nodes
monitor multiple Services and/or Nodes
include both internal PMM agents and External Exporters

Resource types and management¶

All resources (Nodes, Services, and Agents) have specific Types which define their properties and operational logic. These Types determine how each resource behaves and what properties it can have within PMM.

The management of these resources follows specific patterns:

Nodes and Services: These are inherently external resources. PMM does not manage their actual creation or deletion. Instead, PMM maintains an inventory of these resources within PMM Server, allowing you to add them to or remove them from the inventory as needed.
Agents: Most Agents are initiated and halted by pmm-agent. The exception is the External Exporter Type, which is initiated externally. Agents are responsible for collecting and reporting monitoring data about Nodes and Services.

Authentication¶

API access requires authentication using service account tokens.

For details about controlling access to the PMM Server components and resources, see Authentication with service accounts topic.