Troubleshooting DB issues for Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server

Database health

You need to manually recover the database on EC2 instance [i-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx].

The DB instance restarted.

The support perimeter monitors the DB instance state. It also monitors how many restarts occurred during the previous hour and day.

You're notified when the instance is in a state where it still exists, but you can't interact with it.

Log in to the host and examine the state of your RDS Custom for SQL Server database.

ps -eo pid,state,command | grep smon

If necessary, restart your RDS Custom for SQL Server DB instance to get it running again. Sometimes you might need to reboot the host.

After the restart, the RDS Custom agent detects that the DB instance is no longer in an unresponsive state. It then notifies the support perimeter to reevaluate your DB instance state.

Database file locations

The RDS Custom instance is going out of perimeter because an unsupported configuration was used for database files location.

All SQL Server database files are stored on the D: drive by default, in the D:\rdsdbdata\DATA directory.

If you create or alter the database file location to be anywhere other than the D: drive, then RDS Custom places the DB instance outside the support perimeter.

We strongly recommend that you don't save any database files on the C: drive. You can lose data on the C: drive during certain operations, such as hardware failure. Storage on the C: drive doesn't offer the same durability as on the D: drive, which is an EBS volume.

Also, if database files can't be found, RDS Custom places the DB instance outside the support perimeter.

Shared memory connections

The RDS Custom instance is going out of perimeter because an unsupported configuration was used for shared memory protocol.

The RDS Custom agent on the EC2 host connects to SQL Server using the shared memory protocol.

If this protocol is turned off (Enabled is set to No), then RDS Custom can't perform its management actions and places the DB instance outside the support perimeter.

RDS Custom agent status

The RDS Custom instance is going out of perimeter because an unsupported configuration was used for RDS Custom agent.

The RDS Custom agent must always be running.

The support perimeter monitors the RDS Custom agent process state on the host every 1 minute.

On RDS Custom for SQL Server, a stopped agent is recovered by the monitoring service. The DB instance goes outside the support perimeter if the RDS Custom agent is uninstalled.

Log in to the host and make sure that the RDS Custom agent is running.

You can use the following commands to find the agent's status.

$name = "RDSCustomAgent"
$service = Get-Service $name
Write-Host $service.Status

If the status isn't Running, you can start the service with the following command:

Start-Service $name

SSM agent status

The RDS Custom instance is going out of perimeter because an unsupported configuration was used for SSM agent.

The SSM agent must always be running. The RDS Custom agent is responsible for making sure that the Systems Manager agent is running.

The support perimeter monitors the SSM agent process state on the host every 1 minute.

For more information, see Troubleshooting SSM Agent.

Amazon EC2 instance state

The state of the EC2 instance [i-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] has changed from [RUNNING] to [STOPPING].

The Amazon EC2 instance [i-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] has been terminated and can't be found. Delete the database instance to clean up resources.

The Amazon EC2 instance [i-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] has been stopped. Start the instance, and restore the host configuration. For more information, see the troubleshooting documentation.

The support perimeter monitors EC2 instance state-change notifications. The EC2 instance must always be running.

If the EC2 instance is stopped, start it and remount the binary and data volumes.

If the EC2 instance is terminated, RDS Custom performs an automated recovery to provision a new EC2 instance.

Amazon EC2 instance attributes

The RDS Custom instance is going out of perimeter because an unsupported configuration was used for EC2 instance metadata.

The support perimeter monitors the instance type of the EC2 instance where the RDS Custom DB instance is running. The EC2 instance type must stay the same as when you set it up during RDS Custom DB instance creation.

Change the EC2 instance type back to the original type using the EC2 console or CLI.

To change the instance type because of scaling requirements, do a PITR and specify the new instance type and class. However, doing this results in a new RDS Custom DB instance with a new host and Domain Name System (DNS) name.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes

The RDS Custom instance is going out of perimeter because an unsupported configuration was used for EBS volume metadata.

RDS Custom creates two types of EBS volume, besides the root volume created from the Amazon Machine Image (AMI), and associates them with the EC2 instance.

The binary volume is where the database software binaries are located. The data volumes are where database files are located. The storage configurations that you set when creating the DB instance are used to configure the data volumes.

The support perimeter monitors the following:

If you detached any initial EBS volumes, contact Amazon Support.

If you modified the storage type, Provisioned IOPS, or storage throughput of an EBS volume, revert the modification to the original value.

If you modified the storage size of an EBS volume, contact Amazon Support.