Maintaining an RDS instance

One of the main benefits of using RDS is that a lot of the normal maintenance tasks a DBA would carry out on-premises are handled for you by RDS. However, there are still some tasks that need to be handled.

Let's look at the most common tasks, starting with how to check database logs.

Checking database logs

It's common for databases to suffer from failures or generate errors that need to be investigated. On-premises, a DBA would look at the database logs stored on the server to start troubleshooting. However, on RDS, since there is no access to the operating system, we need to use a different method to access the logs.

There are three different methods we can use to check the database logs:

• Use the RDS instance page on the AWS console.
• Use a SQL query within the RDS instance.
• Use CloudWatch logs.

CloudWatch is only available if you have enabled it. You can enable CloudWatch log publishing while provisioning the...