Using CloudWatch Database Insights to troubleshoot query performance from calling services

This article demonstrates how to use CloudWatch Database Insights' calling services feature to quickly identify which applications are causing database performance issues by integrating with CloudWatch Application Signals.

• Enable Database Insights Advanced mode on RDS/Aurora instances to collect database telemetry
• Enable Application Signals on calling services (Lambda, ECS, EKS, EC2) to instrument applications with OpenTelemetry
• Enable Transaction Search to link application traces with database performance data
• Use the Calling Services tab to identify which service is overloading the database
• Drill into Application Signals to pinpoint specific operations and SQL queries causing issues
• Trace complete request paths from client through application to database using distributed traces
• Supports cross-account and cross-Region database fleet monitoring from a single console

This unified observability approach reduces database incident investigation time from hours to minutes by eliminating manual cross-team coordination and providing complete visibility into application-to-database dependencies.