Monitoring Amazon DocumentDB

Monitoring your AWS services is an important part of keeping your systems healthy and functioning optimally. It’s wise to collect monitoring data from all parts of your AWS solution so that you can more easily debug and fix failures or degradations, should they occur. Before you begin monitoring your AWS solutions, we recommend that you consider and formulate answers for the following questions:

  • What are your monitoring goals?

  • What resources are you going to monitor?

  • How frequently will you monitor these resources?

  • What monitoring tools will you use?

  • Who is responsible for doing the monitoring?

  • Who is to be notified and by what means if something goes wrong?

To understand your current performance patterns, identify performance anomalies, and formulate methods to address issues, you should establish baseline performance metrics for various times and under differing load conditions. As you monitor your AWS solution, we recommend that you store your historical monitoring data for future reference and for establishing your baselines.

In general, acceptable values for performance metrics depend on what your baseline looks like and what your application is doing. Investigate consistent or trending variances from your baseline. The following is advice about specific types of metrics:

  • High CPU or RAM use — High values for CPU or RAM use might be appropriate, provided that they are in keeping with your goals for your application (like throughput or concurrency) and are expected.

  • Storage volume consumption — Investigate storage consumption (VolumeBytesUsed) if space that is used is consistently at or above 85 percent of the total storage volume space. Determine whether you can delete data from the storage volume or archive data to a different system to free up space. For more information, see Amazon DocumentDB Storage and Amazon DocumentDB Quotas and Limits.

  • Network traffic — For network traffic, talk with your system administrator to understand what the expected throughput is for your domain network and internet connection. Investigate network traffic if throughput is consistently lower than expected.

  • Database connections — Consider constraining database connections if you see high numbers of user connections in conjunction with decreases in instance performance and response time. The best number of user connections for your instance will vary based on your instance class and the complexity of the operations being performed.

  • IOPS metrics—The expected values for IOPS metrics depend on disk specification and server configuration, so use your baseline to know what is typical. Investigate if values are consistently different from your baseline. For best IOPS performance, make sure that your typical working set fits into memory to minimize read and write operations.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) provides a variety of Amazon CloudWatch metrics that you can monitor to determine the health and performance of your Amazon DocumentDB clusters and instances. You can view Amazon DocumentDB metrics using various tools, including the Amazon DocumentDB console, AWS CLI, and CloudWatch API.