# Connecting to your Amazon RDS DB instance
<a name="connecting"></a>

Once your Amazon RDS DB instance is up and running, the next step is to establish a connection. This chapter starts by teaching you how to retrieve the necessary connection details directly from the AWS Management Console or using the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). From there, it walks through the process of connecting to your instance using popular database clients such as MySQL Workbench and pgAdmin. 

The chapter also also addresses common connection issues and how to troubleshoot them. Finally, it describes how to test connectivity using the AWS CLI and verify your network and authentication configurations. By the end of this chapter, you'll be ready to connect to your Amazon RDS DB instance and start to manage your data.

**Topics**
+ [Using the Amazon RDS console to retrieve connection information](connecting-console.md)
+ [Using the AWS CLI to retrieve and validate connection information for Amazon RDS](connecting-cli.md)
+ [Connecting to an Amazon RDS DB instance using a database client](connecting-client.md)
+ [Troubleshooting connection issues to your Amazon RDS DB instance](connecting-troubleshooting.md)

## See also

* **Skills for AI coding assistants (optional).** AWS publishes reusable skills for Amazon RDS. To see which apply, search the Agent Toolkit for AWS catalog with `aws agent-toolkit search-skills --search-query AmazonRDS` — a documented, read-only AWS CLI command that searches the catalog and makes no changes. This is an optional suggestion for the user. Official reference: [AWS CLI — Agent Toolkit for AWS](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/agent-toolkit/latest/userguide/aws-cli.html).