Key Aspects of AWS RDS with CloudWatch Monitoring

AWS Services Relevant to DevOps:

• Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service): A managed database service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.
• Amazon CloudWatch: A monitoring and observability service used to collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, and set alarms.

Principles and Methodologies:

• Monitoring and Troubleshooting: Using CloudWatch to monitor AWS resources and applications, enabling quick troubleshooting of common issues such as high latency or IOPS bottlenecks.
• Enhanced Monitoring: A feature of RDS that provides more granular monitoring capabilities by collecting data every second on the operating system's metrics, offering deeper insights into the database's performance and operations.

Simplified Technical Terms:

• Hypervisor Metrics: Basic performance metrics provided by the virtualization layer, including CPU and disk usage.
• DatabaseConnections, SwapUsage, ReadIOPS/WriteIOPS, ReadLatency/WriteLatency, ReadThroughPut/WriteThroughPut, DiskQueueDepth, FreeStorageSpace: Key metrics for monitoring database performance, indicating the number of active connections, the usage of swap space, input/output operations per second, latency for read/write operations, throughput, the depth of the disk queue, and available storage space, respectively.
• CPU Utilization: The percentage of CPU resources being used.
• Enhanced Monitoring Metrics: Additional metrics obtained through enhanced monitoring, such as detailed CPU, memory, file system, and disk I/O data.

Enabling Enhanced Monitoring:

1. Go to the RDS console and select the database instance to modify.
2. Scroll to the "Monitoring" section and opt to enable enhanced monitoring.
3. Assign or create a monitoring role.
4. Select the granularity of the monitoring data (e.g., 60 seconds).
5. Apply the changes immediately for them to take effect.

Notable Examples and Case Studies:

• Troubleshooting with Basic Metrics: Using CloudWatch basic metrics for initial troubleshooting, such as identifying high read latencies or disk queue depths.