Monitor Aurora with CloudWatch metrics, alarms, and SNS

Besides traditional database engines like PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server, AWS offers a cloud-optimized database engine as well: Amazon Aurora. The main benefits of Aurora are performance, reliability, and scalability. Because Aurora is a fully managed service, there are only a few things you have to monitor.

CloudWatch metrics

Each cluster sends metrics to CloudWatch that we can monitor with CloudWatch alarms. We recommend creating alarms for the following metrics:

• CPUUtilization: The percentage of CPU used by an Aurora DB instance.
• CPUCreditBalance: The number of CPU credits left (only applies to db.t* instance types).
• FreeableMemory: The amount of available random access memory in MB.

Events via SNS

Besides metrics, RDS sends out events if the state of the database instance has changed. E.g., because of a failover.

We recommend subscribing to events of the following categories:

• failover
• failure
• low storage
• maintenance
• notification
• recovery

Set up instructions

Monitoring Assistant
Monitor Aurora and receive alerts in Slack or Microsoft Teams!

1. Add marbot to Slack or Microsoft Teams.
2. Invite marbot to a channel.
3. Follow the setup wizard.

It couldn't be easier!

Take your AWS monitoring to a new level! Chatbot for AWS Monitoring: Configure monitoring, escalate alerts, solve incidents.

Andreas Wittig

Consultant focusing on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Entrepreneur building marbot.io. Author of Amazon Web Services in Action, Rapid Docker on AWS, and cloudonaut.io.

You can contact me via Email, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Published on 23 Jul 2018