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Amazon RDS performance insights

End of Support Notice

Please note that starting June 30, 2026, RDS performance insights console experience and flexible retention period pricing will no longer be supported. We recommend you use Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights going forward to access an expanded set of capabilities, including fleet-level monitoring, integration with application performance monitoring, lock analysis, and more.

What is RDS performance insights?

RDS performance insights is a database performance tuning and monitoring feature that helps you quickly assess your database load and determine when and where to take action. It allows you 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 application performance, and requires zero configuration or maintenance. You can detect performance problems as they happen as performance insights show the source of the database load so you can tune SQL statements or increase system resources. For development and test databases, you can use performance insights to monitor CPU consumption, assess SQL query impact pre-production, right-size instances, and decide if queries need tuning for better performance.

With seven days of free performance history retention, it's easy to track down and solve a wide variety of issues. The API and SDK also 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.

Benefits

IT generalists and database experts can access a simple interface that aggregates core performance information in one chart. 

Performance insights helps you quickly identify performance bottlenecks, such as high CPU consumption, lock waits, or I/O latency, and which SQL statements are contributing to them. When migrating to the cloud or new instance types, you can use performance insights to determine if SQL statements tuning is needed when migrating to the cloud or new instance types. 

You can quickly enable Performance Insights and access it in the RDS Management Console to automatically collect performance metrics and manage monitoring resource with no configurations or maintenance.

FAQs

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Performance problems appear in the performance insights section of the RDS Management Console as spikes in the database load graph. One look at this graph can quickly tell you what type of resources your application has been spending time and resources on in the database. The console allows you to zoom in to any period within the retention time. By selecting the periods of high load, you can display a list of SQL statements ordered by overall contribution to load.

Performance insights samples the state of connected sessions in your DB instance every second. If a session is spending time on a database-related operation, performance insights record the current time, the type of operation (I/O, CPU, locking, etc.), the current SQL statement, and several other session attributes. Over time, this sampled data is used to characterize how sessions are contributing to load in your database instance.

No., performance insights does not populate any tables in the database nor does it present data to be retrieved from within the database via SQL. Rather, performance insights provide access to performance data via the RDS API and the RDS Management Console. 

Yes, by default, performance insights display a moving one hour window of performance data, and is designed to present the latest performance information within a few seconds of real time.

Performance insights includes a free tier with a trailing seven days of performance data retention. Long-term retention up to two years is available at a small fraction of the instance price.

Yes, you can de-select the option in the wizard to prevent performance insights from being enabled, or you can disable performance insights in an enabled instance by modifying the instance.

Yes.

At the core of performance insights is a single metric called DB Load, which measures how an application is spending time in the database. DB Load is measured in units of average active sessions (AAS). An active session is a connection (session) that has submitted work to the database engine and is waiting for a response from it. For example, if you submit a SQL statement to a database instance that session is considered “active” during the time that the instance is processing that query.

By counting the number of sessions that are active in an instance at a given moment, we can provide a metric which, averaged over time periods, can show how busy an instance is and how much time sessions are spending waiting for the instance to respond. This is DB Load. Performance insights count active sessions and records each session’s attributes about every second using a lightweight sampling mechanism.

The sampled data is encrypted and aggregated to a variety of granularities and served through the API and in the DB Load chart in the RDS Management Console.

No, performance insights is enabled by default. However, performance insights will work even better on some database engines when additional performance tracking is enabled. For instance, when the pg_stat_statement extension is enabled on Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition, performance insights will take advantage of the additional information provided by that extension to use the PostgreSQL-native SQL identifier to label the statement.

The performance insights agent is designed to stay out of your database workloads' way. When performance insights detect heavy load or depleted resources, it backs off – still collecting data but only when it is safe to do so. Database options, such as pg_stat_statement in Aurora PostgreSQL, may use some database resources and potentially affect performance.

Whether enabling these options will affect a particular system depends on the application workload. AWS recommends testing any database options against your workload prior to enabling them on a production system.

If you're using enhanced monitoring to monitor O/S metrics, you should continue to obtain that data via Enhanced Monitoring.

Yes, performance insights encrypt all potentially sensitive data using your own AWS Key Management Service (KMS) key. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. AWS personnel cannot access or see any potentially sensitive performance data. Only your users on your AWS account with full access to RDS can view performance insights.

Stopping a RDS instance that has performance insights enabled has no effect on retention or visibility of historical data for that instance. The period during which the instance was stopped will contain no data.

Performance insights expose a publicly available API designed to enable you to take advantage of the valuable data inperformance insights.

Yes, performance insights expose a publicly available API designed to enable you and third parties performance tools to take advantage of the valuable data in performance insights.

Yes, performance insights is available in all AWS Regions, including AWS GovCloud Region, where RDS is available.

Yes, performance insights can be enabled on existing RDS instances by modifying the instance to enable performance insights.

No, performance insights do not consume storage space on your RDS instances.

Performance insights is designed to present a common approach, look, and feel to tuning across all RDS database engines. Certain attributes, like wait events and SQL identifiers vary by engine type, will naturally vary in performance insightswhen working with different database engines.

One of the core tenets of performance insights is existing concepts, identifiers, and attributes in a database engine should remain intact. Performance insights will generally not re-interpret or rename wait events and other engine-specific attributes, but will present them faithfully as reported by the database engine.

Yes, performance insights works on both multi-AZ instances and read replica instances. As Aurora Replicas instances are independent instances, you can either enable or disable performance insights on those instances.

No, you can not export your data from performance insights. However, data obtained via performance insights is available via an API for consumption.

No, you can not import your data into performance insights for performance analysis. Performance insights only shows data that has been collected directly from an instance, and you can perform analysis using AWS Analytics services, such as Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Quicksight.