Overview of Amazon RDS and Amazon CloudWatch

By default, Amazon RDS automatically sends metric data to CloudWatch in 1-minute periods. For example, the CPUUtilization metric records the percentage of CPU utilization for a DB instance over time. Data points with a period of 60 seconds (1 minute) are available for 15 days. This means that you can access historical information and see how your web application or service is performing.

You can now export Performance Insights metrics dashboards from Amazon RDS to Amazon CloudWatch. You can export either the preconfigured or customized metrics dashboards as a new dashboard or add them to an existing CloudWatch dashboard. The exported dashboard is available to view in the CloudWatch console. For more information on how to export the Performance Insights metrics dashboards to CloudWatch, see Exporting Performance Insights metrics to CloudWatch.

As shown in the following diagram, you can set up alarms for your CloudWatch metrics. For example, you might create an alarm that signals when the CPU utilization for an instance is over 70%. You can configure Amazon Simple Notification Service to email you when the threshold is passed.

Amazon RDS publishes the following types of metrics to Amazon CloudWatch:

• Metrics for your RDS DB instances

  For a table of these metrics, see Amazon CloudWatch metrics for Amazon RDS.

• Performance Insights metrics

  For a table of these metrics, see Amazon CloudWatch metrics for Performance Insights and Performance Insights counter metrics.

• Enhanced Monitoring metrics (published to Amazon CloudWatch Logs)

  For a table of these metrics, see OS metrics in Enhanced Monitoring.

• Usage metrics for the Amazon RDS service quotas in your AWS account

  For a table of these metrics, see Amazon CloudWatch usage metrics for Amazon RDS. For more information about Amazon RDS quotas, see Quotas and constraints for Amazon RDS.

For more information about CloudWatch, see What is Amazon CloudWatch? in the Amazon CloudWatch User Guide. For more information about CloudWatch metrics retention, see Metrics retention.