CloudWatch Database Insights now supports historical OS process snapshots

CloudWatch Database Insights now supports the analysis of historical snapshots of operating system (OS) processes running on your databases, allowing you to correlate a spike in database load with OS process metrics.

Database administrators (DBAs) leverage OS metrics to understand how different processes or threads use system resources on their database instances. With this new Database Insights feature, DBAs can now access historical snapshots of OS processes running on their databases, including key metrics like memory and CPU utilization for each running process. OS process snapshots in Database Insights helps DBAs understand how each running process is using system resources on their databases for a given timestamp, making it easy to correlate OS process metrics with database load.

OS process snapshots are now available for both Aurora PostgreSQL and Aurora MySQL in all regions where Database Insights is available. To learn more about OS process snapshots in Database Insights, please refer to the public documentation. To learn more about Database Insights pricing, refer to the CloudWatch pricing page.

To get started with OS process snapshots in Database Insights, ensure you have enabled RDS Enhanced Monitoring and Database Insights Advanced mode. From the Database Instance dashboard, navigate to Database Telemetry and click on the OS processes tab. To correlate OS process metrics with database load, click on any data point on the database load chart, and a snapshot of OS processes will populate accordingly with key metrics per running process for the selected timestamp.