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Creating alerts for RDS

Overview

Alertmanager allows you define your own alert conditions based on the Prometheus expression language expressions.

The aim of this document is to cover the specifics of setting up alerting for RDS.

Prerequisites

This guide assumes the following:

  • You have created a namespace for your application
  • You have an RDS instance defined in that namespace
  • You are already familiar with creating custom alerts, as explained here
  • You know the RDS database identifier you want to monitor (which can be found in the RDS kubernetes secret in your namespace)

RDS metrics

Prometheus gathers and exposes a few RDS metrics. Here is the full list:

aws_rds_cpuutilization_average
aws_rds_database_connections_average
aws_rds_free_storage_space_average
aws_rds_free_storage_space_minimum
aws_rds_free_storage_space_maximum
aws_rds_freeable_memory_average
aws_rds_read_iops_average
aws_rds_read_latency_average
aws_rds_write_iops_average
aws_rds_write_latency_average

An example

This is an example of a PrometheusRule that triggers an alert if the amount of free space of an RDS instance drops below 1Gb:

apiVersion: monitoring.coreos.com/v1
kind: PrometheusRule
metadata:
  namespace: <namespace>
  labels:
    role: alert-rules
  name: prometheus-custom-rules-<application_name>
spec:
  groups:
  - name: application-rules
    rules:
    - alert: RDSLowStorage
        expr: aws_rds_free_storage_space_average{dbinstance_identifier="<YOUR_DB_ID"} offset 10m < 1000000000
        for: 5m
        labels:
          severity: <SEVERITY>
        annotations:
          message: "[{{ environment|upper }}] RDS free storage space is less than 1GB"
  • Run

After creating a YAML file containing your prometheus rule, you can apply it like this:

kubectl apply -f prometheus-custom-rules-<application_name>.yaml -n <namespace>

We recommend keeping your prometheus rule definitions in your namespace folder in the environments repository. This ensures that your rules will be recreated in the event that we ever need to reinstall prometheus.

This page was last reviewed on 25 November 2024. It needs to be reviewed again on 25 May 2025 by the page owner #cloud-platform .
This page was set to be reviewed before 25 May 2025 by the page owner #cloud-platform. This might mean the content is out of date.