Amazon Redshift Adds New CloudWatch Metrics for Easy Visualization of Cluster Performance

You can now monitor the performance and health of your Amazon Redshift cluster with two new Amazon CloudWatch metrics, Query Throughput and Query Duration. These metrics monitor Redshift cluster performance and provide insights to adjust workload management settings to improve query performance. We have also improved the user interface to view the Query Performance Data on the console.

Query Throughput measures the average number of queries completed per second. Query Duration measures the average time taken to complete a query. By observing these metrics, you can easily determine how your cluster is performing at any time.

You can use these insights to optimize your Amazon Redshift Workload Manager (WLM) configuration or configure processes, such as ETL or long-running queries, at different times of the day depending on your requirements. You can also use these metrics and graphs when reaching out to AWS Support to help quickly diagnose any potential issues, such as a runaway query. To learn how to set up the WLM settings refer to Configuring Workload Management section in the Cluster Management Guide.

You can directly view these metrics in graphical form from the Amazon Redshift console. Simply click on Clusters in the left hand menu, select the cluster that you want to monitor, and click on the DB Performance tab to see these metrics.

Using Amazon CloudWatch, you can set notification alarms if query throughput falls below a certain threshold or if query latency becomes unusually high. Please refer to Creating Amazon CloudWatch Alarms for further details.

You can also retrieve these metrics on CloudWatch using the following combination of Metric and Dimension Name:

You can also investigate performance of each query via the Queries tab on the console. We have added fields Execution Time, Rows Returned, and Row Throughput to give you complete insight as to how each query is performing. To learn more, please refer to Analyzing Query Execution section in the Redshift Cluster Management Guide.

The new monitoring metrics are available with the latest build 1.0.2058 in all AWS commercial regions. Please see the AWS Region Table for Amazon Redshift availability.