Is MySQL overloaded?

Databases
1

I have a server monitoring page I built. It tells me the status of several server operations. It shows CPU, disk usage…etc. Right now I just have it showing if MySQL is up or not by looking at mysqladmin status Threads. I would guess that as long as there is one thread present the MySQL server is up?

I would like to add the ability to tell if MySQL is overloaded or at what level it is running (approx). What ssh command could I derive this information from? What information should I be looking for?

Is there a metric available that would tell me the ‘load’ on MySQL at any given moment?

(on a Linux box running apache php mysql)

Thanks in advance for any guidance or assistance you may be able to provide.

2

What are the possible responses from ‘path/to/mysql status’? Right now I get something like.

MySQL running (2436) [ OK ]

What are the other possibilities? (I guess I could shut down mysql and see, but the server’s live).

3

Sorry to confuse… i guess I’m having trouble formulating a good question. lol.

If you were using an ssh client and wanted to find out the status of MySQL what would you look at? How would you know if MySQL was becoming overloaded? How would you know it was functioning properly?