ProxySQL is a MySQL/MariaDB protocol-compliant load balancer and reverse proxy with native support for popular backends like ClickHouse, Amazon Aurora, and Amazon RDS. It efficiently distributes queries to database servers, caches results, and improves resource management and performance. Monitoring ProxySQL carefully is crucial as poor performance can lead to increased latency and degradation across dependent parts of the stack. Datadog's integration provides a range of key metrics, including memory usage, query throughput, and cache efficiency, enabling users to visualize, monitor, and alert on dozens of critical metrics in an out-of-the-box ProxySQL dashboard. This allows for effective tracking of proxy performance, query cache efficiency, correlation of cache reads and writes, balanced loads, client-server connections, and slow queries, ultimately ensuring the smooth operation of ProxySQL and its impact on database performance.