A while back we introduced a config option for an alternative database connection which is used for reporting queries: reports_engine.dburi and related directives in /etc/beaker/server.cfg.

The metrics queries which beakerd periodically runs are a good candidate to be sent to the reporting database, since they are quite expensive but can tolerate using slightly out of date data.

That will let us alleviate some load on the main DB in our production environment, by sending the metrics queries to the MySQL replica which we now have.