AWS launches a new tool for diagnosing and fixing database issues in its cloud

AWS today announced a new service that makes it easier for its users to detect, diagnose and resolve issues in their relational databases. DevOps Guru for RDS, AWS's fully managed relational database platform, is part of AWS's DevOps Guru family, which launched last year with a service for detecting issues with machine learning services.

As Swami Sivasubramanian, VP, Amazon AI, argued in his keynote today, being good at managing databases is not a differentiating factor for most businesses, so a lot of them naturally gravitate toward managed services in the cloud. But even so, these customers would still like to see more automation tools for managing these services, especially around diagnosing performance issues, Sivasubramanian noted.

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"We asked ourselves, what if you could get alerts where there is a database issue -- and also get the precise guidance, for instance?," Sivasubramanian said. "What if you could be alerted to a database locking scenario that's causing your ecommerce website to slow down -- and be guided directly to the offending SQL statement?"

DevOps Guru for RDS helps these users detect issues when performance metrics spike for some reason. The service looks at the activity in the database and flags anything unusual. But what's probably most important is that the service then also performs a root cause analysis to recommend changes and -- whenever possible -- it will even automatically remediate issues.