Why You Need to Move from Amazon RDS Performance Insights to CloudWatch Database Insights

If you’re using Amazon RDS Performance Insights (PI) today, here’s some big news: AWS is retiring PI on November 30, 2025, and replacing it with Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights (DBI). That gives you just over a year to plan your migration. Waiting until the last minute could mean losing performance history and scrambling to reconfigure monitoring.

What’s New with Database Insights?

AWS launched DBI in December 2024, calling it the “next-generation observability solution” for databases. If you’ve used PI, DBI will feel familiar — but it comes with:

• Fleet-wide monitoring instead of just per-instance views
• Integration with Application Signals, logs, and events
• New troubleshooting tools like lock diagnostics (Postgres)

Free vs. Paid

Here’s how DBI is packaged:

• DBI Standard (Free): Enabled by default, 7 days retention (same as PI free tier)
• DBI Advanced (Paid): Optional upgrade, 15 months retention, advanced features like log/event correlation, execution plans, and lock analysis

Pricing: More Power, More Cost

Here’s the catch: DBI Advanced costs 6x more than PI.

• Performance Insights (PI): ~$1.50/vCPU-month
• DBI Advanced: ~$9.00/vCPU-month

Other gotchas:

• Cluster-level billing: You pay for the whole cluster, not just selected instances.
• Stopped clusters still bill: Unlike PI, DBI charges don’t stop when the cluster is paused.

Migration Timeline

• Now → Nov 2025: Evaluate PI usage, test DBI
• Nov 30, 2025: PI End-of-Life
• After EOL: Databases automatically roll over to DBI Standard (7 days history)

What You Should Do Now

1. Audit your databases → Identify Amazon RDS/ Amazon Aurora workloads using PI. Learn about the difference between Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS here. 
2.  Decide your needs → Is 7 days enough, or do you need 15 months + advanced features?
3.  Enable DBI proactively → Don’t wait for PI shutdown, or you’ll lose history

Bottom Line

DBI is the future of database monitoring in AWS. Yes, it’s more powerful — but also more expensive and with shorter retention than PI. The earlier you evaluate and migrate, the smoother your transition will be (and the less surprise billing you’ll face).