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AWS RDS/Aurora agent setup

DBtune offers three distinct paths to deploy the tuning agent for RDS and Aurora for PosgreSQL.

Option 1: Evaluation setup—Local agent installation​

  • Best for: Trying out DBtune for the first time on your laptop or desktop for a quick evaluation without infrastructure setup overhead.
  • Goal: A "one-time tuning experience" to see live results immediately.
  • How it works: You install the agent locally on your laptop or desktop (Docker or binary) and point it to your RDS/Aurora instance.
  • Qualification: Ideal for quick test, but not suitable for production.

[Go to Local agent setup guide →]

Option 2: AWS Quick Launch—Automated agent installation​

  • Best for: Tuning a single RDS/Aurora instance. This is the recommended method if you would like to run the agent in your AWS environment.
  • Goal: Remove installation overhead with an automated AWS-native setup called Quick Launch.
  • How it works: A CloudFormation-based wizard provisions a lightweight EC2 instance (t3.nano), configures the required IAM roles and security groups, and installs the agent automatically in your AWS account.
  • Qualification: Ideal if you want a quick and automated installation in your AWS environment. However, it has fewer infrastructure customization opportunities than the manual installation below.

[Go to AWS Quick Launch guide →]

Option 3: Production setup—Manual agent installation​

  • Best for: Enterprise environments with several database instances.
  • Goal: Many infrastructure customization option, as you can for example install multiple agents on a single EC2 instance. With this option you have higher scalability because you can install multiple agents in parallel.
  • How it works: Manual installation of the agent (Docker or binary) on your AWS infrastructure.
  • Qualification: Recommended if you want to customize the installation of one or multiple agents, or if you want to use an automation script to deploy across multiple environments.

[Go to Manual agent installation guide →]

Parameters tuned

DBtune supports multiple tuning modes that determine which parameters can be optimized. For a detailed explanation of tuning modes, see tuning modes.

AWS RDS PostgreSQL

Reload-only tuning mode​

The following parameters are tuned in reload-only mode:

  1. work_mem
  2. random_page_cost
  3. seq_page_cost
  4. checkpoint_completion_target
  5. effective_io_concurrency
  6. max_parallel_workers_per_gather
  7. max_parallel_workers
  8. max_wal_size
  9. min_wal_size
  10. bgwriter_lru_maxpages
  11. bgwriter_delay
  12. effective_cache_size
  13. maintenance_work_mem
  14. default_statistics_target
  15. max_parallel_maintenance_workers

Restart tuning mode​

The following parameters are tuned in restart mode, in addition to all reload-only parameters:

  1. shared_buffers
  2. max_worker_processes
  3. wal_buffers
  4. huge_pages
AWS Aurora PostgreSQL

Reload-only tuning mode​

The following parameters are tuned in reload-only mode:

  1. work_mem
  2. random_page_cost
  3. seq_page_cost
  4. max_parallel_workers
  5. max_parallel_workers_per_gather

Restart tuning mode​

Currently, restart tuning mode is not supported for AWS Aurora.

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