Transition from Performance Insights to CloudWatch Insights for Production Database

AWS is transitioning from RDS Performance Insights (PI) to CloudWatch Database Insights (DBI) with an end-of-life date of November 30, 2025. Let me address your concerns:

1. Cost comparison: Yes, CloudWatch Database Insights Advanced mode will be more costly compared to Performance Insights. For example, for an instance with 2 vCPUs in us-east-1:

• Performance Insights with 15-month retention costs approximately $4.76 USD per month
• Database Insights Advanced mode costs approximately $18.25 USD per month

For provisioned instances, DBI Advanced mode pricing is approximately $9 per vCPU per month, while PI pricing is significantly lower.

2. Transition steps and downtime: The transition should not cause any downtime for your 800GB MySQL RDS instance. If you're currently using Performance Insights, your database will automatically default to using the Standard mode of Database Insights after the transition date. To upgrade to Advanced mode, you'll need to explicitly enable it through the RDS console. No database restart is required for this change as it's just enabling a monitoring feature.

3. Level of detail and insights: CloudWatch Database Insights offers two modes:

• Standard mode (default): Provides 7-day metric retention, basic DB load analysis, and monitoring features
• Advanced mode: Offers 15-month metric retention (same as PI paid tier), enhanced monitoring capabilities, operating system process analysis, fleet-wide monitoring views, and SQL analysis tools

The Advanced mode of Database Insights actually provides more features than Performance Insights, including fleet-wide monitoring views, enhanced SQL analysis tools, and integration with CloudWatch Application Signals.

If you take no action before November 30, 2025, your RDS instance will default to the Standard mode of Database Insights, which might cause you to lose access to performance data history beyond 7 days and some analysis features. To maintain similar or enhanced capabilities compared to Performance Insights, you should plan to upgrade to the Advanced mode of Database Insights before the transition date.
Sources
Transitioning from RDS Performance Insights to CloudWatch Database Insights | AWS re:Post
Performance Insights to CloudWatch Database Insights | AWS re:Post
Choosing the new monitoring view from the Monitoring tab - Amazon Relational Database Service
Choosing the new monitoring view from the Performance Insights page - Amazon Relational Database Service