Percona Live London starts on Monday, so this is the last in the series of free-Percona-Live tickets we’ll give away. But first — have you ever wondered what servers are in your MySQL replication hierarchy?

We have, too. As consultants, a lot of times we need to get a quick overview of the whole replication hierarchy and specific things about it, such as replication filters, versions, whether replication is running, how far behind it is, and so on. These things are very important for making sure that we don’t break something in the system, get blamed for breaking replication when it was already broken, and so on.

So we built pt-slave-find (it was actually born as mk-slave-find, ages ago before I even worked at Percona). It automatically detects and connects to every server in the replication hierarchy, and prints out a summary of each one’s most important details.

Here’s an example. Notice how one of the servers has a replication filter on it, the servers don’t all have the same version installed, and some are in the AWS cloud. All of these things are important to know — if we run a checksum on the non-cloud servers, for example, we could make the cloud servers fall far behind in replication.

So that’s how you can quickly find out what’s in your replication hierarchy, how it’s configured, and a few basic bits of status information.

Now how do you win a free ticket to Percona Live London? Watch our @percona Twitter stream to find out!