Amazon RDS Performance Insights is a database performance tuning and monitoring feature that helps you quickly assess the load on your database, and determine when and where to take action. Performance Insights allows non-experts to detect performance problems with an easy-to-understand dashboard that visualizes database load.

Performance Insights uses lightweight data collection methods that don’t impact the performance of your applications, and makes it easy to see which SQL statements are causing the load, and why. It requires no configuration or maintenance, and is currently available for Amazon Aurora (PostgreSQL- and MySQL-compatible editions) and Amazon RDS for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and SQL Server.

With seven days of free performance history retention, it's easy to track down and solve a wide variety of issues. The Amazon Web Services API and SDK make it easy to integrate Performance Insights into on-premises and third-party monitoring tools. If you need longer-term retention, you can choose to pay for up to two years of performance history retention.

It's easy to get started: just log into the Amazon RDS Management Console, and enable Performance Insights when creating or modifying an instance of a supported RDS engine. Then go to the Performance Insights dashboard to start monitoring performance.

Benefits

Easy to Use

Performance Insights is for both IT generalists and database experts. Instead of displaying multiple graphs that require manual correlation, it provides a simple interface that aggregates all core performance information into one chart. When the load is high, you can easily identify the type of bottleneck such as high CPU consumption, lock waits or I/O latency, and see which SQL statements are creating the bottleneck.

Powerful

Performance Insights lets you monitor multiple database performance metrics without having to analyze numerous complex graphs. All the metrics are aggregated into one simple, powerful dashboard. Whether your database performance problem is due to database configuration or application design issues, you can quickly identify the bottleneck and see which SQL statements are contributing to it.

Automated

Performance Insights requires no configuration or maintenance. You simply enable it on your RDS instance, and access it with one click in the RDS Management Console. Performance Insights automatically collects all the necessary performance metrics and manages the resources needed to monitor your databases. Other than a lightweight data collection mechanism, all resources used for monitoring are separate from your database instance.

Benefits

Easy to Use

Powerful

Automated

What Can You Monitor With Performance Insights?

Production Applications

Detect performance problems in production as soon as they happen. Performance Insights shows what’s causing the load on the database, so you can take corrective action by tuning your SQL statements or increasing your system resources.

Development and Test Databases

Discover the impact of your SQL queries before going into production. Use Performance Insights to monitor your CPU consumption, and then determine the right instance size for your database, and whether your SQL statements should be tuned for better performance.

Database Migrations

Migrating your database to the cloud, or to a new Amazon Web Services instance type? Use Performance Insights to monitor your CPU consumption, and then determine the right instance size for your database, and whether your SQL statements should be tuned for better performance.