Recently, I have been digging into the depths of MySQL to troubleshoot some performance issues.

The tool innotop has been mentioned in various places, but it appears a little dated — the last release was in 2021 on GitHub, and the project dates back over 16 years.

In searching for an alternative I found dolphie which appears to be more comprehensive, more recently updated and has an interactive TUI (Terminal User Interface).

It has been invaluable in troubleshooting and monitoring, so thought I would share it here.

The easiest way I found to install dolphie was to use pip - an example of what I did on Amazon Linux 2023:

mkdir ~/dolphie
python -m venv ~/dolphie
source ~/dolphie/bin/activate
pip install dolphie
dolphie -h<host> -u<user> -p<pass>

Or run dolphie and use the TUI to enter your DB details. Press ? to open up the help menu and from there explore what’s possible.