How to monitor Amazon Redshift snapshots?

Amazon Redshift is the first fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. Redshift has been announced nearly 10 years ago to overcome the expensive on-prem data warehouse solution. Amazon Redshift is an innovative product to enable customers to rapidly analyze datasets ranging in size from several hundred gigabytes to a petabyte and more. Unlike traditional row-based relational databases, which store data for each row sequentially on disk, Amazon Redshift stores each column sequentially. This means that Redshift performs much less wasted IO than a row-based database because it doesn’t read data from columns it doesn’t need when executing a given query. Since data are stored sequentially, Redshift can compress data efficiently, which further reduces the amount of IO.

This article will walk you through how to set up monitoring for redshift snapshots.

Pre-requisite:

• Amazon Redshift Cluster

Amazon RedShift Snapshot Automation

1. Log in to the AWS console. Navigate to Redshift and click the desired cluster to set up the automatic snapshot

2. On the right side plane, navigate to snapshots under cluster and click on Snapshot schedules. Provide the required snapshot schedule based on the business requirement. If you would like to configure in Unix Cron style, click on “Configure automated snapshot rules”


3. Once you save the schedule, the following window will pop up to attach the redshift cluster

4. You will see something like this below on the successful snapshot schedule. We have successfully set up the Amazon Redshift snapshot schedule to take a snapshot periodically

We have successfully set up the Amazon Redshift snapshot schedule to take a snapshot periodically.

Amazon RedShift Snapshot Monitoring

On regular basis, the snapshot scheduler will take the redshift snapshot to protect data. How can ensure that the snapshot is happening on the defined schedule? We should monitor the automation job to ensure that backup is happening on the defined schedule. In case of snapshot failure, we should be alerted via notification.

1. On the Amazon Redshift console, click the right plane and click “events”

2. Navigate to “Event subscriptions” and click on “Create Event Subscription”

3. Enter the event subscription name and select the type as “snapshot”. If you would like to notify only for snapshot failure, then select “Error”. I have selected “Info & error” to get sample alerts

4. Here are the alert previews

5. To get the notification, you need to enroll Amazon SNS service. I have an existing SNS topic associated with my email address. I have selected the existing SNS topic. Click “Create Event Subscription” to start monitoring the Redshift snapshot

On the successfully alert creation, you will get the message below.

Here are the sample info alerts that I have received after configuring the job.

Conclusion:

We have set up the automated Amazon Redshift snapshot using the cloud-native scheduler. This scheduler will ensure that a snapshot is taken on the defined interval to protect your data. In the end, we have set up a snapshot alert notification using the “Events”. Amazon SNS is a fully managed messaging service. The event subscription required the Amazon SNS topic to send the alerts via email / SMS. Hope this article is informative to you.

BDRSuite for AWS

If you are using AWS EC2, then you may already know that AWS adopts a Shared Responsibility Model, in which AWS is responsible only for the infrastructure and its availability while the users are responsible for the data stored in it.

This means, that even if AWS offers manual snapshots and volume backups, you need a complete AWS Data Protection solution for backup, versioning, archiving, retention and recovery to protect your EC2 instances from data threats in the cloud ranging from accidental file deletion to malware attacks.

With more than a decade of experience in data protection, BDRSuite for AWS offers a simple, secure, and cloud-native AWS backup software for your AWS EC2 instances. You can recover your backup instance, volume, or even files at any time with near-zero RTO.

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