Please note that this content is targeted for SysOps administrators. If 1
you're a Solutions Architect or a developer you may want to skip over this 2
one 3
Welcome back to BackSpace Academy. In this lecture on monitoring RDS we'll go 4
through the monitoring options that are available for the RDS service we'll also 5
look at the enhance monitoring that is available that provides real-time 6
monitoring of our instances we'll look at RDS events that provide us with a 7
unique service for RDS to alert us to issues and we'll also look at the 8
downloading of database log files that are produced from the actual database 9
engine the monitoring options that are available for us with RDS. As with most 10
services we have CloudWatch alarms that can alert us to an issue we have 11
CloudWatch logs that we can use for archiving of this information from CloudWatch and 12
we can also have CloudWatch events that become that we can use to invoke other 13
services that we can subscribe to and get messages from, we also have the 14
enhanced monitoring now that is specific to RDS and it provides real-time 15
operating system metrics for RDS and against specific to RDS we have the RDS 16
events that we can subscribe to these RDS events and we can have an SNS 17
message sent out to us if something occurs that is unusual we also have 18
database log files and they are produced by the specific database engine so you 19
you've got mySQL that it will produce a certain set of log files if 20
you have SQL Server it produces it so instead of log files as well so we're 21
looking to how we can actually access those and and view those another new 22
service that we've got there is the Amazon performance insights and that 23
provides a lot more visualization and some further metrics that we can use for 24
monitoring our instances and finally we can look at implementing cloud trail on 25
our RDS instances and that will enable us to record API action to our audience 26
instances and to store that with Amazon CloudWatch logs 27
so RDS enhance monitoring, when it is enabled on an instance, it will 28
provide real-time operating system metrics for that instance they can be 29
viewed in the console or you can actually view and download your cloud 30
watch logs for those metrics it's not available for t1 micro and m1 small 31
instances and the cost will vary there is a free tier usage level but if you 32
exceed that then you are going to be charged and so that depends on what 33
you're monitoring interval is so how frequently you are actually getting this 34
information and logging that information the number of instances that you'll be 35
monitoring and the amount of activity that needs to be reported so for example 36
if you're doing compute metrics and you've got a compute intensive instance 37
or large instance that's doing a lot of compute operations then there may be 38
more activity to report so you need to take that into consideration if you're 39
looking to stay under the free tier RDS events we can subscribe to those and 40
they will trigger an SNS notification for us there are multiple event types 41
and within the event types there are multiple types as well within that so 42
there was a very broad range of events that we can subscribe to and it provides 43
a very good granularity if we're looking for certain out of the ordinary events 44
that we want to be alerted to so we can view those events again not only via the 45
SNS notification service but we also can view them with the RDS console and the 46
command-line interface or the API or SDK so database log files they are produced 47
by the specific database engine that we are using and that that varies depending 48
on what engine we are using for example mySQL you can see there we've got 49
error slow query and general logs whereas Oracle it doesn't have error 50
logs available so the logs that are available or the log files that are 51
available to us depends on what database engine we're using so those log files 52
like be downloaded and viewed using the RDS 53
console the command-line interface or the API tools and transaction logs are 54
not supported so we're looking about error logs and general logs but we're 55
not looking at actual transaction logs they're not supported so that brings us 56
to the end of this lecture and the best way to really understand this is to 57
start to use it so we'll have a hands-on les lesson coming up next and I'll see 58
you in that one