A terminal-based PostgreSQL performance monitoring and tuning tool.

Ellie connects to a PostgreSQL server and provides a real-time interactive dashboard for visualizing server health, active sessions, configuration settings, and detailed performance analysis — all from your terminal.

The name "Ellie" comes from the female mammoth character in the Ice Age movies.

More screenshots here.

• Dashboard — Real-time server metrics: cache hit ratio, transactions, rollbacks, locks, conflicts, active sessions, and shared buffers usage.
• Activity — Live view of all active connections, running queries, wait events, and client details.
• Settings — Browse all PostgreSQL configuration parameters with their current values, units, and descriptions.
• File Settings — View settings as loaded from the server's configuration files.
• Tuning — 18 structured performance analyses across five categories: disk allocation, table fragmentation, indexing, shared buffers, and query performance.
• About — Application information and credits.
• UI — Text user interface (TUI). It runs directly in the terminal. Browse tables, adjust column widths, reposition columns.

• PostgreSQL 10 or later.
• A database user with read access to system catalog views (pg_stat_*, pg_class, etc.)
• For full tuning functionality, the following PostgreSQL extensions must be enabled:
  • pg_buffercache — required for Shared Buffers analyses
  • pg_stat_statements — required for Time-Consuming Queries analyses

To activate these extensions, follow the steps below:

1. Run in the SQL console:

ALTER SYSTEM SET shared_preload_libraries = 'pg_stat_statements';

2. Restart the server instance.
3. Run in the SQL console:

CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS pg_stat_statements;
CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS pg_buffercache;

4. Tests whether the views exists:

SELECT * FROM pg_stat_statements;
SELECT * FROM pg_buffercache;

ellie [OPTIONS]

# Connect using individual parameters
ellie --host db.example.com --port 5432 --user admin --password secret --database mydb

# Connect using a URL
ellie --url postgresql://admin:secret@db.example.com:5432/mydb

Just unzip it and run it in the terminal.

Pre-compiled binaries for 64-bit Linux and Windows are available in releases.

You will need the Rust compiler. If you don't have it, follow these instructions: https://rust-lang.org/tools/install/

Install dev dependencies:

sudo apt install build-essential

Clone the source code:

git clone https://github.com/luizferreira-io/ellie
cd ellie

Build it:

cargo build --release

The binary will be located at target/release/ellie.

If you want to build with musl ABI (for maximum compatibility and portability), install musl dev dependencies:

sudo apt-get install musl-tools musl-dev

Add the target:

rustup target add x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

And build it:

cargo build --release --target x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

The binary will be located at target/x86_64-unknown-linux-musl/release/ellie.

You will need the Rust compiler. If you don't have it, follow these instructions: https://rust-lang.org/tools/install/

Clone the source code:

git clone https://github.com/luizferreira-io/ellie
cd ellie

Build it:

cargo build --release

The binary will be located at target\release\ellie.exe.

This is a terminal application. Even on Windows, open terminal first (PowerShell, etc.), and only then run it.

With Rust installed, just run:

cargo test

• Connection profiles — Save and switch between multiple named server connections without re-entering credentials each time.
• Configuration file — Support a ~/.config/ellie/config.toml for storing default connection parameters.
• Search and filter — Add inline search (/) to filter rows in the Settings, File Settings, and Activity tabs.
• Copy to clipboard — Allow copying the selected row or cell value from any table.
• Export — Export tuning analysis results to CSV or plain text.
• Threshold alerts — Highlight metrics in the Dashboard when they exceed user-defined thresholds (e.g., cache hit ratio below 90%).
• Additional tuning analyses — Expand the Tuning tab with analyses for replication lag, autovacuum status, and connection saturation.
• Activity — Kill active session/query.

• Reconnect on disconnect — Detect lost connections and attempt automatic reconnection instead of crashing.
• Configurable refresh interval — Let the user adjust the data refresh rate from the Settings tab or via a CLI flag.
• Help overlay — Add an in-app ? keybinding that shows a reference of all shortcuts for the current tab.
• New tabs - Database explorer, query executor/explainer/analyser, and troubleshooting.

The database used for the screenshots and tests is dvdrental, available at:

https://neon.com/postgresql/getting-started/sample-database