Monitor custom database metrics in Amazon RDS for SQL Server using Amazon CloudWatch

This article explains how to create custom CloudWatch metrics for Amazon RDS for SQL Server by combining SQL Server Agent jobs, error logs, and CloudWatch metric filters.

• Create SQL Server Agent jobs with T-SQL scripts to query desired metrics
• Write metric values to SQL Server error log using RAISERROR command
• Schedule jobs to run at regular intervals automatically
• RDS automatically publishes error logs to CloudWatch Logs
• Create CloudWatch metric filters to extract metric values from logs
• Monitor custom metrics in CloudWatch with alarms and dashboards
• Example demonstrates monitoring table size for capacity planning
• Solution requires no additional infrastructure or third-party tools
• Approach scales to monitor row counts, database size, user sessions, etc.

This solution enables comprehensive database visibility by leveraging native SQL Server and AWS capabilities to monitor custom metrics without extra infrastructure.