To effectively monitor the performance of PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS, it is essential to collect metrics from both Amazon CloudWatch and directly from each PostgreSQL database instance. This post provides detailed instructions on accessing RDS metrics via AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or CloudWatch-compatible tools, and demonstrates how to visualize these metrics and set alerts. It also explains how to connect to an RDS PostgreSQL instance to query native metrics using PostgreSQL’s statistics views, such as pg_stat_database and pg_stat_user_tables, which are not available on CloudWatch. The post highlights the importance of regularly collecting these metrics to track changes over time, offering insights into replication delay, connection metrics, locks, and disk usage. Additionally, it introduces the next part of the series, which will guide readers on using Datadog for automated metric collection and performance analysis across multiple technologies.