🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Ah, yes. A solution to get a "head start on troubleshooting." How… proactive. An email. Sent after the database has already decided to take a spontaneous vacation. That’s brilliant. Truly. I was just saying to my team the other day, "You know what I miss during a Sev-1 incident? More email." My PagerDuty alert that sounds like a dying air-raid siren clearly isn’t enough. I need a nicely formatted HTML email to arrive five minutes later, telling me what I already know: everything is on fire.

This is a masterpiece of corporate problem-solving. It's like installing a smoke detector that, instead of beeping, sends a polite letter via postal mail to inform you that your house was ablaze ten minutes ago. Thanks for the update, I'll check the mailbox once I find it in the smoldering ashes.

You see, the people who write these articles live in a magical land of slide decks and successful proof-of-concepts. I live in the real world, where "failover" is a euphemism for "the primary just vanished into the ether and the read replica is now screaming under a load it was never designed to handle." And this solution promises me the last 10 minutes of metrics? Fantastic. What about the slow-burning query that started 11 minutes ago? Or the instance running out of memory over the course of an hour? This gives me a perfect, high-resolution snapshot of the symptom, while the actual disease started festering yesterday when a junior dev deployed a migration with a "tiny, insignificant schema change."

Let’s be honest about what a "wide range of monitoring solutions" really means. It means a dozen different browser tabs, five different dashboards that all contradict each other, and a CloudWatch bill that looks like a phone number. And now you’re adding another layer to this beautiful, fragile onion? An automated email pipeline built on Lambda, EventBridge, and SNS? What could possibly go wrong?

I can see it now. It’s 3:17 AM on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend.

• The primary Aurora instance fails over.
• EventBridge fires the event, just like it’s supposed to.
• The Lambda function spins up to gather the "top queries" and "related API calls."
• But wait! The IAM role for the Lambda is slightly misconfigured because of that new security policy that got pushed last week. It can't access Performance Insights.
• The function times out. No email.
• Fifteen minutes later, PagerDuty finally escalates to me. I wake up, see the alert, and frantically check my inbox for that promised "head start." Nothing.

So now I’m doing the exact same thing I would have done anyway—logging into the AWS console with my eyes half-shut, fumbling for my MFA code, and manually digging through the exact same logs this "solution" was supposed to deliver to me on a silver platter. This isn't a head start; it's a false sense of security. It's an extra moving part that will, inevitably, be the first thing to break during the exact crisis it was designed to help with.

...sending an email after a reboot or failover with the last 10 minutes of important CloudWatch metrics...

This is the kind of thinking that gets you a new sticker for the company laptop. I have a whole graveyard of those stickers on my old server rack in the garage. RethinkDB. Clusterix. Even a shiny one from that "unbreakable" database vendor that went under after their own service had a three-day outage. They all promised a revolution. Zero-downtime migrations. Effortless scaling. Intelligent self-healing. And they all ended up with me, at 3 AM on a holiday, trying to restore from a backup that was probably corrupted.

So, sure. Go ahead and deploy this. It’s a cute project. It’ll look great on a sprint review. You've successfully automated the first paragraph of the "Database Down" runbook. Just do me a favor and don't remove my PagerDuty subscription. I prefer my alerts loud, obnoxious, and—unlike this email—actually delivered on time.

Keep up the great work, team. You're building the future. I'll just be over here, making sure the past doesn't burn it all down.