Step 4: Test and Verify

At this point, your pganalyze setup should be ready to collect EXPLAIN plans, as long as the role your application connects as has the auto_explain settings from Step 3 applied, and Log Insights is set up and receiving log data. Since you may not have any slow queries in your system right now, we can generate a synthetic slow query that we can use to confirm everything is working.

The collector includes a flag to do this for you automatically, based on your auto_explain.log_min_duration:

sudo pganalyze-collector --test-explain

This will produce no output but will run an artificially slow query using the Postgres pg_sleep function.

Assuming the collector is running in the background, after a few minutes you should then see EXPLAIN plans show up in the pganalyze EXPLAIN plan list:

When you select one of the query executions in this list, you will see details of the corresponding plan:

From now on, you will get EXPLAIN plans automatically in the pganalyze UI for all your slow queries that exceed your auto_explain.log_min_duration threshold and auto_explain.sample_rate setting.

Learn more about how pganalyze works with EXPLAIN data.