RDS is Amazon's managed relational database service. While RDS manages your databases maintenance, uptime and upgrade it is your responsibility to determine the cluster's scale and capacity. So the big question is when do you need to scale up? To answer this question you should understand and monitor seven metrics for each server in your cluster. They are:_x000D_

_x000D_
1. Database connections_x000D_
2. Freeable memory_x000D_
3. CPU credit balance_x000D_
4. Free local storage_x000D_
5. Replica lag_x000D_
6. Commit latency_x000D_
7. Select latency_x000D_

This video gives a brief intro to each of these metrics and helps you understand what you should be monitoring with them.

You will have to set up monitoring for each of these seven metrics on each server in each of your clusters. This means creating the notifications with the appropriate thresholds and behaviors that your app requires.

It's a headache to get those thresholds correct now and manage them as you scale up. Every time you scale up you must manually adjust the thresholds on your existing alarms to match the new limits and capacities. Or, simply use Blue Matador. We create, manage, and fine tune thresholds for all of these metrics and more out of the box.