AWS adds observability support to Aurora PostgreSQL Limitless

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added observability support to its managed Aurora PostgreSQL Limitless service to help enterprises monitor the health of their database fleet and troubleshoot issues around it.

Observability of databases is crucial for enterprise stakeholders, including DevOps engineers, application developers, and database administrators (DBAs), as it allows them to understand the internal state of the databases and engage in proactive maintenance and issue resolution.  

According to AWS, the observability support for Aurora PostgreSQL Limitless can be accessed via CloudWatch Database Insights — a module inside Amazon CloudWatch, launched last year, to help monitor and troubleshoot AWS databases, such as Amazon Aurora MySQL, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon RDS for SQL Server, and other relational databases including RDS for Oracle, and RDS for MariaDB databases.

Database Insights, as a module, works by consolidating logs and metrics from applications, databases, and the operating system on which they run into a unified view for enterprise stakeholders, the cloud services provider said.

“Using its pre-built dashboards, recommended alarms, and automated telemetry collection, enterprises can monitor the health of their database instances and use a guided troubleshooting experience to drill down to individual instances for root-cause analysis,” AWS wrote in a blog post.

Database insights has two modes

Enterprises can use Database Insights in Standard and Advanced modes, with Standard as the default.

Features such as viewing a consolidated dashboard of database metrics on the DB Health Dashboard, configuring and viewing database telemetry and logs, viewing Amazon RDS events in Database Insights, visualizing per-query statistics, and analyzing slow SQL queries are only available in advanced mode.        

Database Insights for Auora PostgreSQL Limitless will track metrics, such as database load and maximum CPU, at the shard group level.

While database load measures average active sessions in the database, maximum CPU measures the computational power available to the database.

Database load as a metric can be further sliced into subcategories such as top instances, wait events, and top SQL, helping enterprises drill down further into understanding which instances or queries are consuming the most resources of the database.

It is designed to help enterprises optimize queries and workloads to get the most out of their database instances, the cloud services provider said.

Database Insights for Aurora PostgreSQL Limitless can be enabled from the CloudWatch console. Enterprises can also enable Database Insights for Limitless instances using the AWS APIs and SDKs, the cloud services provider said, adding that the pricing of the module varies across regions.

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