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Turning Performance Insights on and off for Amazon RDS - Amazon Relational Database Service

Turning Performance Insights on and off for Amazon RDS

Important

AWS has announced the end-of-life date for Performance Insights: July 31, 2026. After this date, Amazon RDS will no longer support the Performance Insights console experience. The Performance Insights console will redirect to CloudWatch Database Insights. Flexible retention periods (1–24 months) and their associated pricing are preserved in Standard mode of Database Insights at the same cost as Performance Insights today. The Performance Insights API will continue to exist with no changes. Costs for the Performance Insights API will appear in your AWS bill with the cost of CloudWatch Database Insights.

We recommend that you review your DB instances using Performance Insights and choose the Database Insights mode that best fits your needs before July 31, 2026. For core monitoring with flexible retention, Standard mode of Database Insights preserves your existing experience and pricing. For advanced capabilities including fleet-level monitoring, lock diagnostics, and execution plan capture, see Turning on the Advanced mode of Database Insights for Amazon RDS.

If you take no action, DB instances using Performance Insights will default to using the Standard mode of Database Insights with your existing retention period configured. Your CloudFormation templates, Terraform configurations, and deployment scripts will continue to work exactly as they do today – all Performance Insights API parameters, including retention period settings, are fully preserved. After July 31, 2026, only the Advanced mode of Database Insights will support execution plans and on-demand analysis.

With CloudWatch Database Insights, you can monitor database load for your fleet of databases and analyze and troubleshoot performance at scale. For more information about Database Insights, see Monitoring Amazon RDS databases with CloudWatch Database Insights or Register for upcoming workshops to learn more. For current pricing information, see Amazon CloudWatch Pricing.

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 by modifying your DB instance from the console. 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 Overview of 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

After creating a new DB instance or Multi-AZ DB cluster, Amazon RDS enables Performance Insights by default. To turn off Performance Insights, choose the option Database Insights – Standard and deselect the option Enable Performance Insights.

For more information, see the following topics.

The following screenshot shows the Performance Insights section.

Turn on Performance Insights during DB instance or Multi-AZ DB cluster creation with console.

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

  • Retention (for the Standard mode of Database Insights only) – The amount of time to retain Performance Insights data. The retention setting 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 Changing 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 manage Performance Insights.

To manage Performance Insights 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. To turn on Performance Insights, select Enable Performance Insights. To turn off Performance Insights, choose the option Database Insights – Standard and deselect the option Enable Performance Insights.

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

    • Retention (for the Standard mode of Database Insights only) – The amount of time to retain Performance Insights data. The retention setting 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 and set --database-insights-mode to either advanced or standard. To turn off Performance Insights, specify --no-enable-performance-insights and set database-insights-mode to standard.

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

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-cluster and specifies that Performance Insights data is retained for 93 days (3 months).

For Linux, macOS, or Unix:

aws rds modify-db-cluster \
	--database-insights-mode standard \
    --db-cluster-identifier sample-db-instance \
    --enable-performance-insights \
    --performance-insights-retention-period 93

For Windows:

aws rds modify-db-cluster ^
	--database-insights-mode standard ^
    --db-cluster-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]
Note

You can only toggle Performance Insights for an instance in a DB cluster where Performance Insights is not managed at the cluster level.

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 and set DatabaseInsightsMode to standard.

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

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.