Hello and welcome to this course on monitoring databases hosted in the Amazon Relational Database Service, RDS. This course serves as an introduction to the monitoring of Amazon RDS using AWS-provided tooling. My name is Stephen Cole and I will be your instructor for this course. I've been working in the cloud for several years and currently hold six active AWS certifications including the AWS Certified Database Specialty cert. My contact information is shown on the screen. Please feel free to connect with me or reach out with any questions, comments, or concerns. Alternatively, you can always contact us here at Cloud Academy by sending an email to support@cloudacademy.com and one of our cloud experts will reply to you.

This course is intended for people that are new to database monitoring, or monitoring in general, and need to measure the performance of databases hosted in RDS. If you are new to RDS, new to monitoring on AWS in general, or are looking to gain an understanding of what it means to do database monitoring, this course will cover, at a very high level, what monitoring is, list what AWS tools are available to monitor RDS and outline how these tools work.

My goal, in this course, is to help you understand what monitoring is, how it works, its benefits and how to get started with a monitoring plan. Development in the cloud is highly iterative. It is always changing to adapt to customer, business, and regulatory needs. I also wanna show that there is no single way to monitor that is the best way and that monitoring can and will change over time. Upon completion of this course, if someone asks you if it is possible to monitor database waits, see CPU spikes on a database instance, or get an alert based on available disk space, you'll have an understanding of what questions like this mean and a general idea of where to look.

You should have a basic understanding of cloud computing, in general, preferably with Amazon Web Services experience. Also, RDS is Amazon's relational database service. You should know how relational databases work at a high level. If you're new to Amazon RDS, Cloud Academy has courseware available. My suggestion is to complete the AWS Database fundamentals first. It will make the concepts in this course easier to understand.

While I'm not gonna cover topics like SQL, specific database engines or how to connect to a database, I do expect that you know what these things are and that you have a basic understanding of networking, security and storage. If you've never created a database using RDS, or it's been a while since you've created one, Cloud Academy has several labs available to help.

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