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

Building micro-SaaS on AWS.

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

Published on 23 Jul 2018