Re: archive_command / pg_stat_archiver & documentation

On Mon, Mar 1, 2021 at 4:33 PM Benoit Lobréau <benoit(dot)lobreau(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> Le lun. 1 mars 2021 à 08:36, Michael Paquier <michael(at)paquier(dot)xyz> a écrit :
>>
>> On Fri, Feb 26, 2021 at 10:03:05AM +0100, Benoit Lobréau wrote:
>> > Done here : https://commitfest.postgresql.org/32/3012/
>>
>> Documenting that properly for the archive command, as already done for
>> restore_command, sounds good to me. I am not sure that there is much
>> point in doing a cross-reference to the archiving section for one
>> specific field of pg_stat_archiver.
>
>
> I wanted to add a warning that using pg_stat_archiver to monitor the good health of the
> archiver comes with a caveat in the view documentation itself. But couldn't find a concise
> way to do it. So I added a link.
>
> If you think it's unnecessary, that's ok.

Maybe this can be better addressed than with a link in the
documentation. The final outcome is that it can be difficult to
monitor the archiver state in such case. That's orthogonal to this
patch but maybe we can add a new "archiver_start" timestamptz column
in pg_stat_archiver, so monitoring tools can detect a problem if it's
too far away from pg_postmaster_start_time() for instance?