Amazon Aurora is a MySQL-compatible database offered on Amazon RDS, providing features such as auto-scaling storage, low-latency replication, and rapid automated failover. To effectively monitor performance, it's crucial to track key metrics in areas like query throughput, latency, resource utilization (CPU, memory, network), and connection metrics (open connections, failed attempts). Monitoring these metrics can help identify bottlenecks, optimize queries, and ensure the database instance has sufficient resources. The Aurora-specific metric `AuroraReplicaLag` tracks the lag time between the source instance and read replicas, which should be investigated if consistently long. By monitoring these metrics, users can maintain good application performance, upgrade instance types as needed, or add read replicas to mitigate I/O limitations.