Amazon RDS and Aurora (PostgreSQL) Logs

Ship PostgreSQL, upgrade, and IAM authentication error logs from Amazon RDS and Aurora to Bronto to troubleshoot query latency, locking, and auth failures.

Amazon RDS and Aurora can publish PostgreSQL logs to CloudWatch Log Groups, where they become available for ingestion. RDS and Aurora don’t deliver these logs directly to Amazon Data Firehose or S3.

Log type	Export name	Contents
PostgreSQL log	postgresql	Errors, connections, slow queries, autovacuum activity, and pgAudit output
Upgrade log	upgrade	Engine upgrade output (RDS only)
IAM DB authentication error log	iam-db-auth-error	Failed IAM database authentication attempts. Requires IAM database authentication
Instance log	instance	Aurora only

What goes into the postgresql log is controlled by parameter-group settings such as log_statement, log_min_duration_statement, log_connections, and log_autovacuum_min_duration.

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Recommended method

CloudWatch Log Forwarder — enable the postgresql log export (and optionally upgrade and iam-db-auth-error) on the DB instance or cluster (Modify → Log exports). The Bronto forwarder Lambda subscribes to the resulting CloudWatch Log Groups (/aws/rds/instance/<instance>/postgresql or /aws/rds/cluster/<cluster>/postgresql) and streams events into Bronto.

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Alternatives

• Amazon Data Firehose — for very high-volume environments. Enable PostgreSQL log exports to CloudWatch Logs, then add a subscription filter on the log group targeting a Firehose stream. PostgreSQL logs arrive as plain stderr text, so Bronto stores them raw and a custom parser is required to extract fields. See Record formats.

See Ingesting AWS Data into Bronto for the full service-to-method mapping.

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References

• Amazon RDS — PostgreSQL log access