Turning Performance Insights on and off

You can turn on Performance Insights for your DB instance or Multi-AZ DB cluster when you create it. If needed, you can turn it off later. Turning Performance Insights on and off doesn't cause downtime, a reboot, or a failover.

Note

Performance Schema is an optional performance tool used by Amazon RDS for MariaDB or MySQL. If you turn Performance Schema on or off, you need to reboot. If you turn Performance Insights on or off, however, you don't need to reboot. For more information, see Turning on the Performance Schema for Performance Insights on Amazon RDS for MariaDB or MySQL.

The Performance Insights agent consumes limited CPU and memory on the DB host. When the DB load is high, the agent limits the performance impact by collecting data less frequently.

Console

In the console, you can turn Performance Insights on or off when you create or modify a DB instance or Multi-AZ DB cluster.

Turning Performance Insights on or off when creating a DB instance or Multi-AZ DB cluster

When you create a new DB instance or Multi-AZ DB cluster, turn on Performance Insights by choosing Enable Performance Insights in the Performance Insights section. Or choose Disable Performance Insights. For more information, see the following topics:

• To create a DB instance, follow the instructions for your DB engine in Creating an Amazon RDS DB instance.

• To create a Multi-AZ DB cluster, follow the instructions for your DB engine in Creating a Multi-AZ DB cluster.

The following screenshot shows the Performance Insights section.

If you choose Enable Performance Insights, you have the following options:

• Retention – The amount of time to retain Performance Insights data. The retention setting in the free tier is Default (7 days). To retain your performance data for longer, specify 1–24 months. For more information about retention periods, see Pricing and data retention for Performance Insights.

• AWS KMS key – Specify your AWS KMS key. Performance Insights encrypts all potentially sensitive data using your KMS key. Data is encrypted in flight and at rest. For more information, see Configuring an AWS KMS policy for Performance Insights.

Turning Performance Insights on or off when modifying a DB instance or Multi-AZ DB cluster

In the console, you can modify a DB instance or Multi-AZ DB cluster to turn Performance Insights on or off.

To turn Performance Insights on or off for a DB instance or Multi-AZ DB cluster using the console

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Amazon RDS console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/rds/.

2. Choose Databases.

3. Choose a DB instance or Multi-AZ DB cluster, and choose Modify.

4. In the Performance Insights section, choose either Enable Performance Insights or Disable Performance Insights.

   If you choose Enable Performance Insights, you have the following options:

   • Retention – The amount of time to retain Performance Insights data. The retention setting in the free tier is Default (7 days). To retain your performance data for longer, specify 1–24 months. For more information about retention periods, see Pricing and data retention for Performance Insights.

   • AWS KMS key – Specify your KMS key. Performance Insights encrypts all potentially sensitive data using your KMS key. Data is encrypted in flight and at rest. For more information, see Encrypting Amazon RDS resources.

5. Choose Continue.

6. For Scheduling of Modifications, choose Apply immediately. If you choose Apply during the next scheduled maintenance window, your instance ignores this setting and turns on Performance Insights immediately.

7. Choose Modify instance.

AWS CLI

When you use the create-db-instance AWS CLI command, turn on Performance Insights by specifying --enable-performance-insights. Or turn off Performance Insights by specifying --no-enable-performance-insights.

You can also specify these values using the following AWS CLI commands:

• create-db-instance-read-replica

• modify-db-instance

• restore-db-instance-from-s3

• create-db-cluster (Multi-AZ DB cluster)

• modify-db-cluster (Multi-AZ DB cluster)

The following procedure describes how to turn Performance Insights on or off for an existing DB instance using the AWS CLI.

To turn Performance Insights on or off for a DB instance using the AWS CLI

• Call the modify-db-instance AWS CLI command and supply the following values:

  • --db-instance-identifier – The name of the DB instance.

  • --enable-performance-insights to turn on or --no-enable-performance-insights to turn off

  The following example turns on Performance Insights for sample-db-instance.

  For Linux, macOS, or Unix:

  aws rds modify-db-instance \
      --db-instance-identifier sample-db-instance \
      --enable-performance-insights

  For Windows:

  aws rds modify-db-instance ^
      --db-instance-identifier sample-db-instance ^
      --enable-performance-insights

When you turn on Performance Insights in the CLI, you can optionally specify the number of days to retain Performance Insights data with the --performance-insights-retention-period option. You can specify 7, month * 31 (where month is a number from 1–23), or 731. For example, if you want to retain your performance data for 3 months, specify 93, which is 3 * 31. The default is 7 days. For more information about retention periods, see Pricing and data retention for Performance Insights.

The following example turns on Performance Insights for sample-db-instance and specifies that Performance Insights data is retained for 93 days (3 months).

For Linux, macOS, or Unix:

aws rds modify-db-instance \
    --db-instance-identifier sample-db-instance \
    --enable-performance-insights \
    --performance-insights-retention-period 93   

For Windows:

aws rds modify-db-instance ^
    --db-instance-identifier sample-db-instance ^
    --enable-performance-insights ^
    --performance-insights-retention-period 93  

If you specify a retention period such as 94 days, which isn't a valid value, RDS issues an error.

An error occurred (InvalidParameterValue) when calling the CreateDBInstance operation: 
Invalid Performance Insights retention period. Valid values are: [7, 31, 62, 93, 124, 155, 186, 217, 
248, 279, 310, 341, 372, 403, 434, 465, 496, 527, 558, 589, 620, 651, 682, 713, 731]

RDS API

When you create a new DB instance using the CreateDBInstance operation Amazon RDS API operation, turn on Performance Insights by setting EnablePerformanceInsights to True. To turn off Performance Insights, set EnablePerformanceInsights to False.

You can also specify the EnablePerformanceInsights value using the following API operations:

• ModifyDBInstance

• CreateDBInstanceReadReplica

• RestoreDBInstanceFromS3

• CreateDBCluster (Multi-AZ DB cluster)

• ModifyDBCluster (Multi-AZ DB cluster)

When you turn on Performance Insights, you can optionally specify the amount of time, in days, to retain Performance Insights data with the PerformanceInsightsRetentionPeriod parameter. You can specify 7, month * 31 (where month is a number from 1–23), or 731. For example, if you want to retain your performance data for 3 months, specify 93, which is 3 * 31. The default is 7 days. For more information about retention periods, see Pricing and data retention for Performance Insights.