Getting Started

Before initializing OtterTune's development website, make sure that you have followed the Quick Setup with Vagrant instructions and are connected to the running Vagrant machine over SSH.

Initialize the website & load the database

From the home directory, navigate to the top-level website directory in the ottertune repo. Initialize the OtterTune website and then load the test_website fixture to create a fake user with existing applications and data already loaded.

WARNING: This will delete everything from the website's database and reload it with fake data for testing/development.

cd ottertune/server/website
fab create_test_website

Start the server and load the URL in your browser

Start the development server:

fab start_debug_server

Now open up a browser on your host machine and navigate to http://localhost:8000. You should see OtterTune's login page being served from the VM that was setup by Vagrant. Sign in as the fake user using the following credentials:

• username: user
• password: abcd123

Explore the website structure

Click on the link to the user's test_project. We see that the user has two applications:

1. A basic application for uploading and visualizing the values of the DBMS's internal runtime metrics for different knob configurations. Explore the user's basic_application app to see the graphs, tables, and other visualizations that OtterTune provides for comparing the performance of different workloads and/or knob configurations.

2. A tuning application (or session) where OtterTune recommends new DBMS knob configurations that optimize a target objective specified by the user (in this session, it's the throughput). OtterTune chooses the next DBMS knob configuration based on the knowledge it has gathered so far about the user's workload as well as the knowledge that it has gained from tuning DBMSs for other workloads in the past.