Monitoring AWS DMS tasks

AWS DMS uses Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to provide notifications when an AWS DMS event occurs, for example the creation or deletion of a replication instance. AWS DMS groups events into categories that you can subscribe to, so you can be notified when an event in that category occurs. For example, if you subscribe to the Creation category for a given replication instance, you are notified whenever a creation-related event occurs that affects your replication instance. You can work with these notifications in any form supported by Amazon SNS for an AWS Region, such as an email message, a text message, or a call to an HTTP endpoint. For more information, see Working with Amazon SNS events and notifications in AWS Database Migration Service

You can monitor the progress of your task by checking the task status and by monitoring the task's control table. Task status indicates the condition of a AWS DMS task and its associated resources. It includes such indications as if the task is being created, starting, running, or stopped. It also includes the current state of the tables that the task is migrating, such as if a full load of a table has begun or is in progress and details such as the number of inserts, deletes, and updates have occurred for the table. For more information about monitoring task and task resource condition, see Task status and Table state during tasks. For more information about control tables, see Control table task settings.

Using Amazon CloudWatch alarms, you watch one or more task metrics over a time period that you specify. If a metric exceeds a given threshold, a notification is sent to an Amazon SNS topic. CloudWatch alarms do not invoke actions because they are in a particular state. Rather the state must have changed and been maintained for a specified number of periods. AWS DMS also uses CloudWatch to log task information during the migration process. You can use the AWS CLI or the AWS DMS API to view information about the task logs. For more information about using CloudWatch with AWS DMS, see Monitoring replication tasks using Amazon CloudWatch. For more information about monitoring AWS DMS metrics, see AWS Database Migration Service metrics. For more information about using AWS DMS task logs, see Viewing and managing AWS DMS task logs.

To log and debug replication tasks, you can use AWS DMS Time Travel. In this approach, you use Amazon S3 to store logs and encrypt them using your encryption keys. You can retrieve your S3 logs using date-time filters, then view, download, and obfuscate logs as needed. By doing this, you can "travel back in time" to investigate database activities.

You can use Time Travel with DMS-supported PostgreSQL source endpoints and DMS-supported PostgreSQL and MySQL target endpoints. You can turn on Time Travel only for full-load and CDC tasks and for CDC only tasks. To turn on Time Travel or to modify any existing Time Travel settings, ensure that your task is stopped.

For more information about Time Travel logs, see Time Travel task settings. For best practices for using Time Travel logs, see Troubleshooting replication tasks with Time Travel.

AWS DMS is integrated with AWS CloudTrail, a service that provides a record of actions taken by a user, IAM role, or an AWS service in AWS DMS. CloudTrail captures all API calls for AWS DMS as events, including calls from the AWS DMS console and from code calls to the AWS DMS API operations. If you create a trail, you can enable continuous delivery of CloudTrail events to an Amazon S3 bucket, including events for AWS DMS. If you don't configure a trail, you can still view the most recent events in the CloudTrail console in Event history. Using the information collected by CloudTrail, you can determine the request that was made to AWS DMS, the IP address from which the request was made, who made the request, when it was made, and additional details. For more information, see Logging AWS DMS API calls with AWS CloudTrail.

You can view, download, and watch database logs for your task endpoints using the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or the API for your AWS database service. For more information, see the documentation for your database service at AWS documentation.