Amazon Aurora | Manageability Flashcards
Can I use Amazon Aurora with applications that require HIPAA compliance?
Manageability
Amazon Aurora | Database
Yes, the MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible editions of Aurora are HIPAA-eligible, so you can use them to build HIPAA-compliant applications and store healthcare related information, including protected health information (PHI) under an executed Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with AWS. If you already have an executed BAA, no action is necessary to begin using these services in the account(s) covered by your BAA. If you do not have an executed BAA with AWS, or have any other questions about HIPAA-compliant applications on AWS, please contact us.
On which instance sizes will Performance Insights be available?
Manageability
Amazon Aurora | Database
All non-micro instance sizes. As RDS introduces new instance sizes, Performance Insights will be made available on those that have sufficient performance.
When will Performance Insights be available for RDS for PostgreSQL, Aurora MySQL, RDS for MySQL, RDS for Oracle, RDS for SQL Server and RDS for MariaDB?
Manageability
Amazon Aurora | Database
Performance Insights will be initially available on Aurora PostgreSQL, followed soon after by Aurora MySQL. Additional engines will be added over time.
How does Performance Insights show me the cause of performance problems?
Manageability
Amazon Aurora | Database
Performance problems appear in the Performance Insights section of the RDS 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, customers can display a list of SQL statements, ordered by overall contribution to load.
How does Performance Insights know about load in my RDS DB instance?
Manageability
Amazon Aurora | Database
Performance Insights samples the state of all of the connected sessions in your DB instance every second. If a session is spending time in a database-related operation, Performance Insights records the sample time, the type of operation (I/O, CPU, locking, etc.), the current SQL statement and several other session attributes. Over periods of time, this sampled data is used to characterize how sessions are contributing to load in your database instance.
Can performance data be queried from inside the RDS instance?
Manageability
Amazon Aurora | Database
No. The Performance Insights sampling process does not populate any tables in the database, nor does it present data to be retrieved from within the database via SQL.
Can I see what is happening on my instance in real time?
Manageability
Amazon Aurora | Database
Yes. By default, Performance Insights displays a moving one hour window of performance data. The feature is designed to present the latest performance information within a few seconds of real time.
How much does Performance Insights cost?
Manageability
Amazon Aurora | Database
Performance Insights includes 24 hours of retained data and console access. Performance Insights while in preview, offers a free tier that includes a trailing 24 hours of performance data retention. Pricing for longer term data rentention will be announced.
How far back can I look at performance data stored in Performance Insights?
Manageability
Amazon Aurora | Database
You can see 24 hours of performance history. Options for longer retention will be announced at a future date.
Can I turn off Performance Insights on new instances, even though it is enabled by default?
Manageability
Amazon Aurora | Database
Yes. The option for Performance Insights is selected by default in the AWS Console when you use the instance creation wizard. 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 my modifying the instance.
Does Performance Insights work on RDS database instances using encrypted storage?
Manageability
Amazon Aurora | Database
Yes. Performance Insights does not read the data you store in your database.
What is DB load and why is it the primary measure used in Performance Insights to detect performance issues?
Manageability
Amazon Aurora | Database
DB load is a time series showing how much time a customer’s applications are spending in the database, and how they are spending that time. 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 counts 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 in the DB Load chart. Console users can select the timeframe they want to view.
Do I have to do anything special to my database to enable Performance Insights?
Manageability
Amazon Aurora | Database
No. 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 RDS PostgreSQL or Aurora PostgreSQL, Performance Insights will use the PostgreSQL-native SQL identifier to identify the statement, and will be able to collect the full text of longer statements. In MySQL, enabling the Performance Schema will allow Performance Insights to collect much richer and deeper detail on wait events affecting the database.
Will enabling Performance Insights affect my database performance?
Manageability
Amazon Aurora | Database
The Performance Insights agent is designed to stay out of the way of your database workloads. Performance Insights runs at a lower priority than the other processes on your instance, and monitors the health of the host and database. When Performance Insights detects heavy load or depleted resources, it backs off from the usual frequency of data gathering, still collecting data, but only when it is safe to do so. Database options, such as pg_stat_statement in RDS PostgreSQL and Aurora Postgres, and Performance Schema in MySQL 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.
Should I keep using Enhanced Monitoring or just use Performance Insights?
Manageability
Amazon Aurora | Database
Customers using Enhanced Monitoring to monitor O/S metrics should continue to obtain that data via Enhanced Monitoring. In the months to come, that data, as well as an extensive colletion of database metrics, will also become available via the Performance Insights console and an API. At that point, customers will be able to obtain all performance data from Performance Insights. Enhanced Monitoring will remain available for those customers who prefer to use it, but we will encourage customers to standardize their database monitoring on Performance Insights.
