I'm involved in both projects. Here' s some insight :
OPM and POWA are not related. They were born at different times and developed by two different R&D teams at DALIBO, a French PostgreSQL company. The fact that they've been released publicly almost at the same time is merely a coincidence
OPM is designed to help a DBA to manage a very large number of servers. It provides answers to the questions : "Is there a problem somewhere on my PostgreSQL servers ? Which instances need to improvements ?"
POWA is more focused showing the "real-time" activity of one specific instance. It provides answers to questions like : "Which queries are slowing down my server right now ?"
If you're familiar with Oracle products, the difference between OPM and POWA is more-or-less the difference between Oracle AWR and Oracle Grid Control.
In a nutshell, if you only have one or two PostgreSQL servers in production, then POWA is easier to install and probably enough for you. If you want more stats and an overview of your servers, then OPM is a better choice.
Both projects are autonomous and moving fast. We're just pushing code on github without direct economic goals or marketing plans :-) In the long run we'll see which one finds its user base and how they evolve.
That being said, we also have other guys working on other similar PostgreSQL tools, in particular :
pgBadger ( http://dalibo.github.io/pgbadger/ ) is a log analyzer which provides rich reports of the database activity. Basically it answers to the question "Which queries should be optimized ?"
pgCluu ( http://pgcluu.darold.net/ ) is a audit/reporting tools, more focused on system and resource utilization. It answers to questions such as "What's the load on my CPUs ? Is my memory swapping ?"
So basically regarding PostgreSQL monitoring, we're just moving in every possible directions at the same time... Some say it's a "waste of time", we prefer the term "Darwinian Approach" :P
I'm involved in both projects. Here' s some insight :
OPM and POWA are not related. They were born at different times and developed by two different R&D teams at DALIBO, a French PostgreSQL company. The fact that they've been released publicly almost at the same time is merely a coincidence
OPM is designed to help a DBA to manage a very large number of servers. It provides answers to the questions : "Is there a problem somewhere on my PostgreSQL servers ? Which instances need to improvements ?"
POWA is more focused showing the "real-time" activity of one specific instance. It provides answers to questions like : "Which queries are slowing down my server right now ?"
If you're familiar with Oracle products, the difference between OPM and POWA is more-or-less the difference between Oracle AWR and Oracle Grid Control.
In a nutshell, if you only have one or two PostgreSQL servers in production, then POWA is easier to install and probably enough for you. If you want more stats and an overview of your servers, then OPM is a better choice.
Both projects are autonomous and moving fast. We're just pushing code on github without direct economic goals or marketing plans :-) In the long run we'll see which one finds its user base and how they evolve.
That being said, we also have other guys working on other similar PostgreSQL tools, in particular :
pgBadger ( http://dalibo.github.io/pgbadger/ ) is a log analyzer which provides rich reports of the database activity. Basically it answers to the question "Which queries should be optimized ?"
pgCluu ( http://pgcluu.darold.net/ ) is a audit/reporting tools, more focused on system and resource utilization. It answers to questions such as "What's the load on my CPUs ? Is my memory swapping ?"
pg_activity ( https://github.com/julmon/pg_activity/ ): is like linux "top" command but for PostgreSQL queries.
pg_stat_kcache ( https://github.com/dalibo/pg_stat_kcache ) will gather statistics about reads done by the filesystem layer
So basically regarding PostgreSQL monitoring, we're just moving in every possible directions at the same time... Some say it's a "waste of time", we prefer the term "Darwinian Approach" :P