One of the great things of mysqlnd as a base library for PHP's MySQL support are the collected statistics. mysqlnd collects about 160 different statistical values about all the things going on. When having such an amount of raw data it, obviously, is quite hard to draw conclusions out of it. Therefore I recently created a PHP library sitting on top of this feature to collect all data, run some analysis and then provide some guidance and made it available from the JSMysqlndAnalytics GitHub repo (see there also for instructions for using Composer).

Using the library is relatively simple as the short instructions show. The library consists of two main parts. On the one side the "Collector"  this is a wrapper around mysqli_get_client_stats() (even though this function is part of mysqli it will also work for applications using ext/mysql or PDO_mysql) which is creating the raw statistics which could be stored away or such and then the actual Analytics engine comparing the values to predefined rules. The current set of rules is a bit limited so I'm looking for input for ideas.

In case you're a Symfony user live is quite easy: Some time ago I already provided an Symfony bundle providing a Symfony Profiling Toolbar plugin showing the statistics. This JSMysqlndBundle has been extended  to make use of these Analytics. The screenshot might give a rough idea on how this looks.

Hope this helps creating better applications! Happy hacking!