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AWS Performance Insights

What it is

AWS Performance Insights is the managed observability surface Amazon RDS exposes for database performance monitoring. It collects time-series metrics at two altitudes — OS-level metrics under the os.* namespace (CPU utilisation, swap activity, block-device IO, etc.) and database-engine-level metrics under the db.* namespace (buffer-cache hit counts, block read time, deadlock counter, transaction counts, SQL row-fetch ratios). Metric paths follow a nested-name convention (e.g. os.cpuUtilization.total, db.Cache.blks_hit, os.diskIO.rdsdev.await).

Why it shows up on this wiki

Performance Insights is the data source for Zalando's concepts/golden-signals-rds|12 Golden Signals methodology and the underlying API that systems/rds-health queries to produce fleet-wide health reports. (Source: sources/2024-02-19-zalando-twelve-golden-signals.)

The canonical metric paths Zalando uses:

Bucket Metric name Purpose
CPU os.cpuUtilization.total Total CPU utilisation
CPU os.cpuUtilization.await Linux IO-wait CPU fraction
Memory os.swap.in, os.swap.out Swap activity (memory pressure)
Disk os.diskIO.rdsdev.readIOsPS Read IOPS on RDS data volume
Disk os.diskIO.rdsdev.writeIOsPS Write IOPS on RDS data volume
Disk os.diskIO.rdsdev.await Block-device IO latency
DB db.Cache.blks_hit / db.IO.blk_read Postgres buffer-cache hit ratio
DB db.IO.blk_read_time Time spent reading blocks from storage
DB db.Concurrency.deadlocks Deadlock count
DB db.Transactions.xact_commit Committed transactions
DB db.SQL.tup_fetched / db.SQL.tup_returned SQL efficiency ratio

Relationship to CloudWatch

Performance Insights and CloudWatch are complementary. CloudWatch exposes coarser-grained metrics at host and service altitude; Performance Insights adds the engine-internal metric surface (Postgres/MySQL buffer-cache counters, SQL stats, deadlock counts) that CloudWatch alone cannot see. Zalando's 12-signal methodology draws primarily from Performance Insights for this reason — 5 of the 12 signals are engine-internal and only available via this API.

Seen in

  • sources/2024-02-19-zalando-twelve-golden-signals — Zalando's methodology queries Performance Insights for all 12 golden signals; the specific metric-path strings in the article (os.diskIO.rdsdev.await, db.Cache.blks_hit, etc.) are Performance Insights names.
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