Overview of monitoring metrics in Amazon RDS - Amazon Relational Database Service
Monitoring planPerformance baselinePerformance guidelinesMonitoring tools

Overview of monitoring metrics in Amazon RDS

Monitoring is an important part of maintaining the reliability, availability, and performance of Amazon RDS and your AWS solutions. To more easily debug multi-point failures, we recommend that you collect monitoring data from all parts of your AWS solution.

Monitoring plan

Before you start monitoring Amazon RDS, create a monitoring plan. This plan should answer the following questions:

  • What are your monitoring goals?

  • Which resources will you monitor?

  • How often will you monitor these resources?

  • Which monitoring tools will you use?

  • Who will perform the monitoring tasks?

  • Whom should be notified when something goes wrong?

Performance baseline

To achieve your monitoring goals, you need to establish a baseline. To do this, measure performance under different load conditions at various times in your Amazon RDS environment. You can monitor metrics such as the following:

  • Network throughput

  • Client connections

  • I/O for read, write, or metadata operations

  • Burst credit balances for your DB instances

We recommend that you store historical performance data for Amazon RDS. Using the stored data, you can compare current performance against past trends. You can also distinguish normal performance patterns from anomalies, and devise techniques to address issues.

Performance guidelines

In general, acceptable values for performance metrics depend on what your application is doing relative to your baseline. Investigate consistent or trending variances from your baseline. The following metrics are often the source of performance issues:

  • High CPU or RAM consumption – High values for CPU or RAM consumption might be appropriate, if they're in keeping with your goals for your application (like throughput or concurrency) and are expected.

  • Disk space consumption – Investigate disk space consumption if space used is consistently at or above 85 percent of the total disk space. See if it is possible to delete data from the instance or archive data to a different system to free up space.

  • Network traffic – For network traffic, talk with your system administrator to understand what expected throughput is for your domain network and internet connection. Investigate network traffic if throughput is consistently lower than expected.

  • Database connections – If you see high numbers of user connections and also decreases in instance performance and response time, consider constraining database connections. The best number of user connections for your DB instance varies based on your instance class and the complexity of the operations being performed. To determine the number of database connections, associate your DB instance with a parameter group where the User Connections parameter is set to a value other than 0 (unlimited). You can either use an existing parameter group or create a new one. For more information, see Working with parameter groups.

  • IOPS metrics – The expected values for IOPS metrics depend on disk specification and server configuration, so use your baseline to know what is typical. Investigate if values are consistently different than your baseline. For best IOPS performance, make sure that your typical working set fits into memory to minimize read and write operations.

When performance falls outside your established baseline, you might need to make changes to optimize your database availability for your workload. For example, you might need to change the instance class of your DB instance. Or you might need to change the number of DB instances and read replicas that are available for clients.

Monitoring tools

Monitoring is an important part of maintaining the reliability, availability, and performance of Amazon RDS and your other AWS solutions. AWS provides various monitoring tools to watch Amazon RDS, report when something is wrong, and take automatic actions when appropriate.

Automated monitoring tools

We recommend that you automate monitoring tasks as much as possible.

Amazon RDS instance status and recommendations

You can use the following automated tools to watch Amazon RDS and report when something is wrong:

  • Amazon RDS instance status — View details about the current status of your instance by using the Amazon RDS console, the AWS CLI, or the RDS API.

  • Amazon RDS recommendations — Respond to automated recommendations for database resources, such as DB instances, read replicas, and DB parameter groups. For more information, see Viewing and responding to Amazon RDS recommendations.

Amazon CloudWatch metrics for Amazon RDS

Amazon RDS integrates with Amazon CloudWatch for additional monitoring capabilities.

  • Amazon CloudWatch – This service monitors your AWS resources and the applications you run on AWS in real time. You can use the following Amazon CloudWatch features with Amazon RDS:

    • Amazon CloudWatch metrics – Amazon RDS automatically sends metrics to CloudWatch every minute for each active database. You don't get additional charges for Amazon RDS metrics in CloudWatch. For more information, see Monitoring Amazon RDS metrics with Amazon CloudWatch.

    • Amazon CloudWatch alarms – You can watch a single Amazon RDS metric over a specific time period. You can then perform one or more actions based on the value of the metric relative to a threshold that you set. For more information, see Monitoring Amazon RDS metrics with Amazon CloudWatch.

Amazon RDS Performance Insights and operating-system monitoring

You can use the following automated tools to monitor Amazon RDS performance:

Integrated services

The following AWS services are integrated with Amazon RDS:

  • Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus service that makes it easy to connect your applications with data from a variety of sources. For more information, see Monitoring Amazon RDS events.

  • Amazon CloudWatch Logs lets you monitor, store, and access your log files from Amazon RDS instances, CloudTrail, and other sources. For more information, see Monitoring Amazon RDS log files.

  • AWS CloudTrail captures API calls and related events made by or on behalf of your AWS account and delivers the log files to an Amazon S3 bucket that you specify. For more information, see Monitoring Amazon RDS API calls in AWS CloudTrail.

  • Database Activity Streams is an Amazon RDS feature that provides a near-real-time stream of the activity in your Oracle DB instance. For more information, see Monitoring Amazon RDS with Database Activity Streams.

Manual monitoring tools

You need to manually monitor those items that the CloudWatch alarms don't cover. The Amazon RDS, CloudWatch, AWS Trusted Advisor and other AWS console dashboards provide an at-a-glance view of the state of your AWS environment. We recommend that you also check the log files on your DB instance.

  • From the Amazon RDS console, you can monitor the following items for your resources:

    • The number of connections to a DB instance

    • The amount of read and write operations to a DB instance

    • The amount of storage that a DB instance is currently using

    • The amount of memory and CPU being used for a DB instance

    • The amount of network traffic to and from a DB instance

  • From the Trusted Advisor dashboard, you can review the following cost optimization, security, fault tolerance, and performance improvement checks:

    • Amazon RDS Idle DB Instances

    • Amazon RDS Security Group Access Risk

    • Amazon RDS Backups

    • Amazon RDS Multi-AZ

    For more information on these checks, see Trusted Advisor best practices (checks).

  • CloudWatch home page shows:

    • Current alarms and status

    • Graphs of alarms and resources

    • Service health status

    In addition, you can use CloudWatch to do the following:

    • Create customized dashboards to monitor the services that you care about.

    • Graph metric data to troubleshoot issues and discover trends.

    • Search and browse all your AWS resource metrics.

    • Create and edit alarms to be notified of problems.