At a glance
Connections In Use is the live count of client connections currently held against the MariaDB server, read from the global status counterThreads_connected. It is the numerator behind connection-pool saturation: every active application thread, replication channel, monitoring probe, and admin session counts. Read it next tomax_connectionsto know how much headroom is left before new sessions are refused with “Too many connections”.
What it tracks
This card surfaces the Connections In Use counter for the selected period, sampled live from the MariaDB server’s global status. The figure isThreads_connected: every open session, whether actively running a query or sitting idle inside an application connection pool, adds one to the total. Background work counts too, so replica I/O threads, mariabackup sessions, and the Vortex IQ monitoring connection all appear in the number. Because connections are capped server-wide by max_connections, this raw count is the foundation for capacity planning: divide it by max_connections and you have the pool-saturation percentage that drives the alerting cards. A healthy instance shows a stable baseline that tracks traffic; a session opened but never closed produces a count that ratchets up over hours and eventually exhausts the cap.
Reconciling against the source
To verify the live count directly on the server, runSHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE 'Threads_connected'; and compare against SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'max_connections';. For the per-session breakdown use SELECT * FROM information_schema.PROCESSLIST;. On managed services (Amazon RDS / Aurora for MariaDB, Azure Database for MariaDB, SkySQL) the same value appears as the DatabaseConnections metric in the provider’s monitoring console; brief differences are timing artefacts between poll intervals.