AWS RDS Monitoring Tools

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient, resizable capacity for an industry-standard relational database and manages common database administration tasks in AWS.

What Can You Monitor

Opsview Monitor's AWS RDS monitoring tools provide 18 service checks to track RDS performance. Service checks included in the Opspack help you identify problem areas in the database such as storage space, IO, throughput and latency issues. Utilize this performance data to correlate information across your AWS environment and build dashboards to share with the team.

Service Checks

Service Check	Description
AWS/RDS.BinLogDiskUsage	The amount of disk space occupied by binary logs on the master
AWS/RDS.CPUUtilization	The percentage of CPU utilization
AWS/RDS.CPUCreditUsage	Must be T2 instance. The number of CPU credits consumed by the instance
AWS/RDS.CPUCreditBalance	Must be T2 instance. The number of CPU credits available for the instance to burst beyond its base CPU utilization
AWS/RDS.DatabaseConnections	The number of database connections in use
AWS/RDS.DiskQueueDepth	The number of outstanding IOs (read/write requests) waiting to access the disk
AWS/RDS.FreeableMemory	The amount of available random access memory
AWS/RDS.FreeStorageSpace	The amount of available storage space
AWS/RDS.ReplicaLag	The amount of time a Read Replica DB instance lags behind the source DB instance
AWS/RDS.SwapUsage	The amount of swap space used on the DB instance
AWS/RDS.ReadIOPS	The average number of disk I/O operations per second
AWS/RDS.WriteIOPS	The average number of disk I/O operations per second
AWS/RDS.ReadLatency	The average amount of time taken per disk I/O operation
AWS/RDS.WriteLatency	The average amount of time taken per disk I/O operation
AWS/RDS.ReadThroughput	The average number of bytes read from disk per second
AWS/RDS.WriteThroughput	The average number of bytes written to disk per second
AWS/RDS.NetworkReceiveThroughput	The incoming (Receive) network traffic on the DB instance, including both customer database traffic and Amazon RDS traffic used for monitoring and replication
AWS/RDS.NetworkTransmitThroughput	The outgoing (Transmit) network traffic on the DB instance, including both customer database traffic and Amazon RDS traffic used for monitoring and replication

Setup AWS RDS Monitoring Tools

Users are required to setup their AWS console user to have programmable API access to their AWS account. This requires you to create an AWS user and to add the Access Key ID and Secret access Key to that AWS account. The following steps illustrate how to acquire these keys.

To create IAM user and Access Keys:

Open IAM Dashboard as described and navigate to Users

Click Add User

Add User Wizard will open:

Specify User Name (any user name of your choice).
Check Programmatic Access

Click Next: Permissions

Permissions page will open

This step is optional. If no policies exist it can be Skipped.

Click Attach Existing policies for the user

Click Next: Review

Review tab will open:

Review new user details and click Create User

The final page will open:

Click Show under the Secret access key column
Copy Access key ID and Secret access key into a safe place to be provided in the variables.

Setup and Configuration

To configure and utilize this Opspack, you need to add the 'Cloud - AWS - RDS CloudWatch' Opspack to the Opsview host representing your RDS instance.

Note

Aurora RDS is not supported with this plugin.
The Credit Balance and Credit Usage service checks will execute only on a t2 burstable instance.
The Replica Lag service check will only execute on the replicated copy of the database instance.

Step 1: Add the host template

Add the Primary Hostname/IP. This should be the Endpoint from the Connectivity & Security tab of an RDS instance in the RDS Console in AWS.
Host Title Can be any name given to the host - by default Opsview chooses it to be the value in the Primary Hostname/IP field.
Choose the Host Group. Add the Cloud - AWS - RDS CloudWatch Host template to your Opsview monitor host

For more information, refer to Opsview Knowledge Center - Adding Host Templates to Hosts.

Step 2: Add and configure the variables for the host

Variable	Description
AWS_CLOUDWATCH_AUTHENTICATION	Authentication details for CloudWatch. The Value is not used and therefore can be set to anything. Either override the File Path with the location of your credentials file, or override the Access Key and Secret Key arguments (this approach is recommended as the values will be encrypted). Optionally, override the Region (default: eu-west-1) with the location of your instance if you are not using the default region.
AWS_CLOUDWATCH_ROLE_ARN	This optional variable is the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of the role to be used for the service checks. Override the Access ARN with the ARN of the role. The account should have AssumeRole(STS) for this ARN.
AWS_RDS_DB_INSTANCE_IDENTIFIER	Load Balancer name from AWS