Amazon CloudWatch metrics for Amazon RDS Performance Insights - Amazon Relational Database Service
Querying other Performance Insights counter metrics in CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch metrics for Amazon RDS Performance Insights

Performance Insights automatically publishes some metrics to Amazon CloudWatch. The same data can be queried from Performance Insights, but having the metrics in CloudWatch makes it easy to add CloudWatch alarms. It also makes it easy to add the metrics to existing CloudWatch Dashboards.

Metric Description

DBLoad

The number of active sessions for the database. Typically, you want the data for the average number of active sessions. In Performance Insights, this data is queried as db.load.avg.

DBLoadCPU

The number of active sessions where the wait event type is CPU. In Performance Insights, this data is queried as db.load.avg, filtered by the wait event type CPU.

DBLoadNonCPU

The number of active sessions where the wait event type is not CPU.

DBLoadRelativeToNumVCPUs

The ratio of the DB load to the number of virtual CPUs for the database.
Note

These metrics are published to CloudWatch only if there is load on the DB instance.

You can examine these metrics using the CloudWatch console, the AWS CLI, or the CloudWatch API. You can also examine other Performance Insights counter metrics using a special metric math function. For more information, see Querying other Performance Insights counter metrics in CloudWatch.

For example, you can get the statistics for the DBLoad metric by running the get-metric-statistics command.

aws cloudwatch get-metric-statistics \
    --region us-west-2 \
    --namespace AWS/RDS \
    --metric-name DBLoad  \
    --period 60 \
    --statistics Average \
    --start-time 1532035185 \
    --end-time 1532036185 \
    --dimensions Name=DBInstanceIdentifier,Value=db-loadtest-0

This example generates output similar to the following.

{
		"Datapoints": [
		{
		"Timestamp": "2021-07-19T21:30:00Z",
		"Unit": "None",
		"Average": 2.1
		},
		{
		"Timestamp": "2021-07-19T21:34:00Z",
		"Unit": "None",
		"Average": 1.7
		},
		{
		"Timestamp": "2021-07-19T21:35:00Z",
		"Unit": "None",
		"Average": 2.8
		},
		{
		"Timestamp": "2021-07-19T21:31:00Z",
		"Unit": "None",
		"Average": 1.5
		},
		{
		"Timestamp": "2021-07-19T21:32:00Z",
		"Unit": "None",
		"Average": 1.8
		},
		{
		"Timestamp": "2021-07-19T21:29:00Z",
		"Unit": "None",
		"Average": 3.0
		},
		{
		"Timestamp": "2021-07-19T21:33:00Z",
		"Unit": "None",
		"Average": 2.4
		}
		],
		"Label": "DBLoad"
		}

For more information about CloudWatch, see What is Amazon CloudWatch? in the Amazon CloudWatch User Guide.

Querying other Performance Insights counter metrics in CloudWatch

You can query, alarm, and graphs on RDS Performance Insights metrics from CloudWatch. You can access information about your DB instance by using the DB_PERF_INSIGHTS metric math function for CloudWatch. This function allows you to use the Performance Insights metrics that are not directly reported to CloudWatch to create a new time series.

You can use the new Metric Math function by clicking on the Add Math drop-down menu in the Select metric screen in the CloudWatch console. You can use it to create alarms and graphs on Performance Insights metrics or on combinations of CloudWatch and Performance Insights metrics, including high-resolution alarms for sub-minute metrics. You can also use the function programmatically by including the Metric Math expression in a get-metric-data request. For more information, see Metric math syntax and functions and Create an alarm on Performance Insights counter metrics from an AWS database.