Amazon Web Services (AWS) RDS Monitoring Tool
Monitor your databases from a unified view
Optimize your workflow with the unified dashboard in SolarWinds® Database Performance Analyzer (DPA), a platform designed to help with RDS monitoring for your cloud databases.
Amazon RDS offers many databases to choose from when extending or moving infrastructure to the cloud, and you don't want to lose performance visibility. Moving databases to the cloud as a service means many of the traditional tasks of a DBA are no longer necessary. However, DBAs will still need to focus on monitoring performance, no matter where the database lives.
Use powerful Amazon RDS monitoring tools to track performance
Amazon RDS monitoring offers DBAs access to a wide variety of back-end solutions, including Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, and Aurora. With SolarWinds DPA, you can view the performance of your databases from a single pane of glass for easier administration. You can also leverage consistent navigation regardless of the database type. This can help you find performance issues (like bottlenecks) causing productivity to suffer, allowing you to find and resolve them quicker.
Leverage forward-thinking, collaborative monitoring
Aurora is currently Amazon's fastest-growing RDS database. As more and more companies start to use this offering, more DBAs will need access to flexible, proactive AWS RDS monitoring tools.
DPA is the first product ready to support Aurora or any other database platform you choose. Don't settle for just monitoring on-premises databases—make sure you have visibility into your cloud database infrastructure.
Deploy monitoring tools in the AWS cloud
You can begin managing RDS or EC2 monitoring for your SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, or SAP ASE (Sybase) instances typically within minutes. Since Database Performance Analyzer is agentless and requires no client software, all configuration and monitoring is done through the web browser interface after you deploy the AMI. Just point your favorite browser at the server name or IP address of the DPA server and start registering instances to monitor.
DPA also allows for flexible implementation, so if you’d rather use perpetual licensing, you can. You can also BYOL (bring your own license) for your Amazon DPA image or on-premises DPA installation by emailing sales@solarwinds.com to get started.
The tool also includes Database Performance Analyzer Central, which is designed to aggregate data from on-premises and cloud installations into a single dashboard and provides the flexibility to monitor an unlimited number of instances.
Ensure around-the-clock AWS RDS monitoring with SolarWinds integrations
DPA is built for granular, to-the-second performance monitoring, providing DBAs with real-time data and historical analysis for AWS instances. It includes blocking and deadlock analysis for SQL blocking hierarchies, which can have a significant effect on throughput and SQL Server responsiveness. In addition, the Amazon RDS monitoring metrics provided by DPA can help you more effectively optimize database performance and prevent overprovisioning.
With the ability to integrate DPA monitoring insights alongside other SolarWinds products using the SolarWinds Orion® Platform, you can use features like PerfStack™ to correlate metrics and AppStack™ to provide end-to-end visibility across your AWS RDS, Aurora, MySQL, SQL Server, and Oracle instances to more easily identify the cause of complex performance issues and quickly resolve them.
What is RDS monitoring?
RDS monitoring involves tracking performance metrics for Amazon Relational Database Service, a web service designed to make it easier for DBAs to set up, run, and scale cloud-based relational databases.
Many companies choose to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as their cloud-based computing provider due to the benefits the platform offers. It’s designed to be an industry-standard, flexible, and easy-to-use service providing cost-effective relational database options with resizable capacity. It also includes management tools for common administrative database tasks.
Databases are integral to the core functionality of many businesses and organizations, so it’s important to monitor them and ensure they operate optimally.
AWS provides the ability to scale—even to the point of thousands of database requests per second—and makes it easier for DBAs to manage terabytes of data. However, large or complex databases need to be monitored to ensure service availability and performance aren’t affected.
This is why it’s important for DBAs to have robust Amazon RDS monitoring capabilities in place. With the right tool, AWS RDS monitoring can simplify the process of managing cloud-based relational databases by combining the capabilities of multiple tools into a centralized RDS monitoring solution.
How does RDS monitoring work?
RDS monitoring helps maintain the availability and performance of Amazon RDS instances and other AWS solutions. RDS monitoring provides DBAs with data associated with different aspects of their AWS solutions, so they can better troubleshoot issues before they impact the performance of the database or web-based service.
Amazon RDS monitoring tools can track several valuable performance metrics, which can be broken into different categories:
- Availability. These metrics allow DBAs to know whether the RDS instances or cluster endpoints are accessible from client-side interactions, whether there are issues with specific instances (such as stops, starts, failovers, or deletions), and whether there are failovers of multi-AZ instances.
- Cost. These metrics allow DBAs to track the monthly cost of each RDS instance.
- Health and Performance. These metrics allow DBAs to keep track of the hardware and capacity used by the Amazon RDS instances, monitoring specifically for metrics like CPU, disk space, and memory usage. This also extends to latency for database queries, latency for disk read/write times, the number of active database connections, and whether there are errors or warnings detected in log files.
- Manageability. These metrics allow DBAs to monitor changes made to the RDS instances’ option groups, parameters, properties, security groups, and tags as well as who made them.
- Recoverability. These metrics allow DBAs to check whether each RDS instance is being properly backed up and whether individual databases have been successfully backed up.
- Security. These metrics allow DBAs to know which users are connecting to each database instance, and they allow them to monitor the queries each user is running.
It’s important to establish baselines for each of these metrics, as they can often be indicative of latent issues capable of having a drastic impact on the RDS and web services.
Why is RDS monitoring important?
Many companies and organizations rely on databases and AWS platform services to perform their routine business-critical functions. For this reason, it’s especially important for DBAs and technology support services staff to ensure all Amazon RDS instances are actively monitored.
By establishing a strong and proactive approach to AWS RDS monitoring, DBAs will have the tools to identify issues before they become fully realized problems, ultimately saving the company time and money.
AWS RDS is easy to use and is a low-administration platform, but this means proper AWS RDS monitoring practices can be easily overlooked. Selecting the right RDS monitoring tool and implementing a proactive database monitoring policy is the smart decision for supporting overall organizational efficiency and peace of mind.
What does an RDS monitoring tool do?
RDS monitoring tools make it straightforward for database admins to monitor and track vital performance metrics. By tracking performance data related to network throughput, I/O read and write, and client connections across all RDS instances, DBAs will have the information they need to make informed decisions about troubleshooting performance issues and ensuring resources are properly allocated and provisioned.
Amazon RDS sends out event notifications when the database instance’s state changes, such as in the case of a multi-AZ failover. RDS monitoring tools allow you to stay on top of these event notifications to better ensure database uptime and performance service levels by allowing you to subscribe to event categories. The most important ones to subscribe to include the following:
- Failover
- Failure
- Low storage
- Notification
- Recovery
RDS monitoring software can also help you establish enforceable baselines and critical thresholds by measuring how the instances perform during different traffic patterns and load conditions. Extending monitoring to historical database instance data helps generate an archive of performance data over time, which DBAs can leverage to identify ongoing performance patterns and recurring anomalies or issues.
How does RDS monitoring work in Database Performance Analyzer?
SolarWinds® Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) is an intuitive and flexible solution offering DBAs visibility into their databases as they extend or shift their infrastructure to cloud-based services and platforms.
From a single unified dashboard, DPA can help you quickly examine performance issues, using at-a-click drill-downs to identify the source of bottlenecks and the root cause of anomalous behavior. In addition, DPA uses algorithmic machine learning to automatically “understand” normal database behavior patterns.
DPA also includes strong anomaly detection capabilities, using spikes in performance to improve performance analysis. Overall, DPA is designed to offer in-depth information about how your AWS RDS instances are performing, and it helps you eliminate inefficiencies, so you can reduce resource requirements and lower cloud compute costs.
- What is RDS monitoring?
- How does RDS monitoring work?
- Why is RDS monitoring important?
- What does an RDS monitoring tool do?
- How does RDS monitoring work in Database Performance Analyzer?
What is RDS monitoring?
RDS monitoring involves tracking performance metrics for Amazon Relational Database Service, a web service designed to make it easier for DBAs to set up, run, and scale cloud-based relational databases.
Many companies choose to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as their cloud-based computing provider due to the benefits the platform offers. It’s designed to be an industry-standard, flexible, and easy-to-use service providing cost-effective relational database options with resizable capacity. It also includes management tools for common administrative database tasks.
Databases are integral to the core functionality of many businesses and organizations, so it’s important to monitor them and ensure they operate optimally.
AWS provides the ability to scale—even to the point of thousands of database requests per second—and makes it easier for DBAs to manage terabytes of data. However, large or complex databases need to be monitored to ensure service availability and performance aren’t affected.
This is why it’s important for DBAs to have robust Amazon RDS monitoring capabilities in place. With the right tool, AWS RDS monitoring can simplify the process of managing cloud-based relational databases by combining the capabilities of multiple tools into a centralized RDS monitoring solution.
"We are using DPA with the Cloud and it is working flawlessly. DPA is unique in the market. I have never seen a product that is as powerful and yet as agnostic across all major relational databases."
Adam Japhet
IT Director
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Database Performance Analyzer for AWS®
