Logging and monitoring in Amazon RDS

Using Amazon CloudWatch alarms, you watch a single metric over a time period that you specify. If the metric exceeds a given threshold, a notification is sent to an Amazon SNS topic or Amazon Auto Scaling policy. CloudWatch alarms do not invoke actions because they are in a particular state. Rather the state must have changed and been maintained for a specified number of periods.

CloudTrail provides a record of actions taken by a user, role, or an Amazon service in Amazon RDS. CloudTrail captures all API calls for Amazon RDS as events, including calls from the console and from code calls to Amazon RDS API operations. Using the information collected by CloudTrail, you can determine the request that was made to Amazon RDS, the IP address from which the request was made, who made the request, when it was made, and additional details. For more information, see Monitoring Amazon RDS API calls in Amazon CloudTrail.

Amazon RDS provides metrics in real time for the operating system (OS) that your DB instance runs on. You can view the metrics for your DB instance using the console, or consume the Enhanced Monitoring JSON output from Amazon CloudWatch Logs in a monitoring system of your choice. For more information, see Monitoring OS metrics with Enhanced Monitoring.

Performance Insights expands on existing Amazon RDS monitoring features to illustrate your database's performance and help you analyze any issues that affect it. With the Performance Insights dashboard, you can visualize the database load and filter the load by waits, SQL statements, hosts, or users. For more information, see Monitoring DB load with Performance Insights on Amazon RDS.

You can view, download, and watch database logs using the Amazon Web Services Management Console, Amazon CLI, or RDS API. For more information, see Monitoring Amazon RDS log files.

Amazon RDS provides automated recommendations for database resources. These recommendations provide best practice guidance by analyzing DB instance configuration, usage, and performance data. For more information, see Viewing and responding to Amazon RDS recommendations.

Amazon RDS uses the Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to provide notification when an Amazon RDS event occurs. These notifications can be in any notification form supported by Amazon SNS for an Amazon Region, such as an email, a text message, or a call to an HTTP endpoint. For more information, see Working with Amazon RDS event notification.

Trusted Advisor draws upon best practices learned from serving hundreds of thousands of Amazon customers. Trusted Advisor inspects your Amazon environment and then makes recommendations when opportunities exist to save money, improve system availability and performance, or help close security gaps. All Amazon customers have access to five Trusted Advisor checks. Customers with a Business or Enterprise support plan can view all Trusted Advisor checks.

Trusted Advisor has the following Amazon RDS-related checks:

For more information on these checks, see Trusted Advisor best practices (checks).