Welcome to this course covering Amazon RDS Performance Insights, a performance monitoring and tuning feature that can quickly assess the load on a database hosted inside Amazon RDS and determine when and where to take action.

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. My contact information is shown on the screen. Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions, comments, or concerns. Alternatively, you can always get in touch with us here at Cloud Academy by sending an email to support@cloudacademy.com.

This course is intended for both new and experienced database administrators that need to assess, understand, and optimize the load that users and applications put on an RDS database.

SQL query optimization is, very often, about addressing blocking problems. However, optimization can also reveal when a database is underutilized and wasting money.

Performance Insights uses lightweight data collection methods that have no impact on the performance of a database or applications using it. Metrics from the database are sent securely to AWS services outside of RDS for storage, reporting, and analysis. By leveraging these AWS services and features, no additional load is put on the database itself.

Many IT departments have accidental database administrators. These are people that are, very often, unexpectedly put into the role of a DBA. For these people, Performance Insights is easy to learn, use, and understand.

For experienced DBAs, Performance Insights provides clear information about how SQL queries are performing and contains information to help with troubleshooting and remediation.

It requires no end-user configuration or maintenance and is currently available for all of the Amazon RDS engines and for all instance types except the very smallest ones.

One of the key challenges database developers and administrators have is gaining visibility into SQL query performance.

Applications tend to go into production with limited, if any, database performance optimizations.

Once in production, a significant amount of time must be spent tuning database configurations and SQL queries.

There are performance monitoring tools for RDS that collect metrics about the database instance.

Amazon CloudWatch monitors database instances at the hypervisor level.

Enhanced Monitoring provides operating system-level monitoring through the use of an agent running on the instance. But both CloudWatch and Enhanced Monitoring metrics are about the instance and not the actual SQL queries that are running.

RDS Performance Insights was created by AWS to detect issues and take corrective action based on active user sessions on an instance. It collects performance metrics from active sessions and displays them on a dashboard with a visual representation of a database's load.

It displays SQL statements creating the load, who is running these queries, where they are originating, and the state those queries are in.

This has been a brief introduction and explanation of RDS Performance Insights. My next lecture will cover, in detail, what Performance Insights is, compare it to Amazon CloudWatch and RDS Enhanced Monitoring, and outline how database load is more than CPU utilization.