Turning Performance Insights on and off for Aurora - Amazon Aurora
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Turning Performance Insights on and off for Aurora

Important

Amazon has announced the end-of-life date for Performance Insights: November 30, 2025. After this date, Amazon RDS will no longer support the Performance Insights console experience, flexible retention periods (1-24 months), and their associated pricing. The Performance Insights API will continue to exist with no pricing changes. Costs for the Performance Insights API will appear in your Amazon bill with the cost of CloudWatch Database Insights.

We recommend that you upgrade any DB clusters using the paid tier of Performance Insights to the Advanced mode of Database Insights before November 30, 2025. For information about upgrading to the Advanced mode of Database Insights, see Turning on the Advanced mode of Database Insights for Amazon Aurora.

If you take no action, DB clusters using Performance Insights will default to using the Standard mode of Database Insights. With Standard mode of Database Insights, you might lose access to performance data history beyond 7 days and might not be able to use execution plans and on-demand analysis features in the Amazon RDS console. After November 30, 2025, 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 Aurora databases with CloudWatch Database Insights. For pricing information, see Amazon CloudWatch Pricing.

You can turn on Performance Insights for your DB cluster when you create it. If needed, you can turn it off later by modifying your DB cluster 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 Aurora 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 Aurora MySQL.

If you use Performance Insights with Aurora global databases, turn on Performance Insights individually for the databases in each Amazon Web Services Region. For details, see Monitoring an Amazon Aurora global database with Amazon RDS Performance Insights.

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 a DB cluster. Enabling Performance Insights allows you to manage Performance Insights settings and options for your DB cluster. Cluster level settings apply to all DB instances in the cluster.

Turning Performance Insights on or off when creating a DB cluster

After creating a new DB cluster, Amazon RDS enables Performance Insights by default. To turn off Performance Insights for your DB cluster, choose the option Database Insights – Standard and deselect the option Enable Performance Insights.

To create a DB cluster, follow the instructions for your DB engine in Creating an Amazon Aurora DB cluster.

The following screenshot shows the Performance Insights section.

Turn on Performance Insights during 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 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.

  • Amazon KMS key – Specify your Amazon 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 Amazon KMS policy for Performance Insights.

Turning Performance Insights on or off when modifying a DB cluster

In the console, you can modify a DB cluster to manage Performance Insights.

To manage Performance Insights for a DB cluster using the console

  1. Sign in to the Amazon Web Services Management Console and open the Amazon RDS console at https://console.amazonaws.cn/rds/.

  2. Choose Databases.

  3. Choose a DB cluster, and choose Modify.

  4. To turn on Performance Insights, select Enable Performance Insights. To turn off Performance Insights for your DB cluster, 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 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.

    • Amazon 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 Aurora resources.

    Modify Performance Insights during DB cluster modifying with console.

  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.

Amazon CLI

When you use the create-db-instance Amazon 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 Amazon CLI commands:

To manage Performance Insights for a DB cluster using the Amazon CLI

  • Call the modify-db-cluster Amazon CLI command and supply the following values:

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

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

    • database-insights-mode – The mode of Database Insights for the DB cluster. To turn off Performance Insights, set this value to standard.

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

    For Linux, macOS, or Unix:

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

    For Windows:

    aws rds modify-db-cluster ^
	--database-insights-mode standard ^
    --db-cluster-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-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 in your DB cluster 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.