Interview with pgDash
Find out more about our sponsor pgDash
Any views or opinions represented or expressed in this interview belong solely to the interviewee and do not necessarily represent those of the 2026 organization, PostgreSQL Europe, or the wider PostgreSQL community, unless explicitly stated.
pgDash is a comprehensive diagnostic and monitoring solution for PostgreSQL. pgDash provides core reporting and visualisation functionality, including collecting and displaying PostgreSQL information and providing time-series graphs, reports, and alerts. SaaS and self-hosted options available.
What is your PostgreSQL centered product or service?
pgDash is a comprehensive diagnostic and monitoring solution designed to help Postgres users ensure the ongoing health and performance of their PostgreSQL deployment. pgDash shows you information and metrics about every aspect of your PostgreSQL database server, collected using the open-source tool pgmetrics.
pgDash provides core reporting and visualization functionality, including collecting and displaying PostgreSQL information and providing diagnostics, time-series graphs, detailed reports, alerting, teams and more. SaaS and self-hosted/on-premise options are available.
How does your company contribute and benefit from PostgreSQL?
Our pgDash product provides in-depth diagnostics and monitoring to help Postgres users ensure the ongoing health and performance of their PostgreSQL deployment. pgDash itself uses Postgres as its main database for both the SaaS and self-hosted options.
We also created and maintain pgmetrics, an open-source, zero-dependency, single-binary tool that can collect 350+ metrics from a running PostgreSQL server and display it in easy-to-read text format or export it as JSON and CSV for scripting. It is used to provide data for pgDash and can also be used as a data source for a wide variety of other tools. It has received more than 1,100 stars on GitHub to date.
Additionally, we have launched ellycache. ellycache is an open-source, zero-dependency, single-binary query cache designed specifically for PostgreSQL. It allows developers to schedule SQL queries on cron-like intervals, cache the results (in-memory or on-disk), and serve them instantly at specified HTTP endpoints via its built-in webserver.
What is the most important feature in the latest PostgreSQL release?
We’re excited about the upcoming query plan hinting feature in PostgreSQL 19, achieved using the pg_plan_advice and the pg_stash_advice extensions. From experience with our own customers, we know that managing performance of queries is one of the more important yet time-consuming tasks of a Postgres DBA. These modules will hopefully make it to Postgres 19 and reduce the gap between Postgres and other commercial RDBMSes in this regard.
We’d love to see how the user community receives, adopts and uses this feature. It should enable users to influence the query planner directly, as opposed to the suboptimal workaround of adding more and more indexes.
Which PostgreSQL extension do you benefit from most, and why?
pg_stat_statements. It is more or less the only way to examine query performance metrics in PostgreSQL. Our product, pgDash, naturally uses PostgreSQL as it's main database. We monitor the performance of the SQL queries that pgDash uses internally just like our customers do -- collecting the metrics from pg_stat_statements using pgmetrics and sending them to pgDash for visualization and alerting.
What feature should be added to PostgreSQL?
We’d love to see more ways to get even more statistics and metrics out of a running core PostgreSQL without using extensions:
- Query progress monitoring
- Enhancement of pg_stat_statements to include identification of query plan of a query, bucket/histogram statistics, values of bound parameters etc.
- Identification of remote peer of a logical or physical replication connection
- CPU usage per backend, disk usage per tablespace etc.
