Overview

Performance Insights offers a rolling seven days of performance data history at no charge. This is enough time to troubleshoot a wide variety of issues. The Performance Insights free tier includes:

  • 7 days of performance data history
  • 1 million API requests per month

To analyze longer-term performance trends, you need to upgrade to the paid tier. The Performance Insights paid tier includes:

  • 1 month to 24 months of performance data history
  • On-demand analysis which helps you identify performance bottlenecks during the selected time period and gives advice on what to do next
  • Proactive recommendations which inform you of impending database performance and availability issues before they become critical

The Performance Insights dashboard in the Amazon RDS Console and Performance Insights flexible retention period pricing will no longer be supported starting November 30, 2025.

After November 30, 2025, the execution plan capture feature for RDS for Oracle and RDS for SQL Server and the on-demand analysis feature in Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition, Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition, and RDS for PostgreSQL will exclusively be available in the “Advanced mode” of CloudWatch Database Insights.

You can learn more about how to get started with the execution plan capture and on-demand analysis features in CloudWatch Database Insights in the technical documentation. We recommend  upgrading any database instance that will be impacted by this change before November 30, 2025. If no action is taken, your database instances will default to the standard mode of Database Insights after that date. As a result, you may lose access to your performance data history beyond seven days and to the execution plan and on-demand analysis features.

To learn how you can upgrade your instances to CloudWatch Database Insights “Advanced mode” in CloudWatch Database Insights, see Turning on the Advanced mode of Database Insights for Amazon RDS.

Pricing is detailed below.

Flexible Retention for Provisioned Instances

Customers can specify performance history retention periods from one month to 24 months. Retention for one month or more is priced per vCPU per month for provisioned instances. The monthly price increases for longer retention periods, and may vary by region

Flexible Retention for Aurora Serverless v2 Instances

Customers can specify performance history retention periods from one month to 24 months. Retention for one month or more is priced per Aurora capacity unit (ACU) per month for Aurora Serverless v2 instances. The monthly price increases for longer retention periods, and may vary by region.

API Requests

After Performance Insights dashboard and flexible retention pricing support is discontinued, Performance Insights APIs will continue to exist without pricing changes. However, their costs will appear under CloudWatch alongside Database Insights charges in your AWS bill after November 30, 2025.

API Pricing Example

As an example, say you create a custom dashboard that makes calls to RDS Performance Insights' two APIs, DescribeDimensionKeys, and GetResourceMetrics. The dashboard calls these two APIs every 5 seconds. That would be:

  • 2 API calls * (30 days * 24 hours * 60 minutes * 60 seconds) / (5 seconds) = 1,036,800 API calls.

The first 1M API calls are free per account and are $0.01 for each 1,000 calls after that. Thus, in this example the cost would be:

  • ((1,036,800 - 1,000,000) / 1,000) * 0.01 = $0.37 per month

If we monitored two instances with our custom dashboard refreshing every 5 seconds, the cost would be:

  • ((2 * 1,036,800 - 1,000,000) / 1,000) * 0.01 = $10.74 per month