Troubleshooting techniques

With any of the AWS managed services such as RDS, it can be difficult to work out if any error you are seeing or performance issue is being caused by the database itself or if there is a problem with the RDS service or the VPC. For example, users are complaining of not being able to log into the database; this could be a database-level issue where perhaps a password has changed or user permissions have been modified, or perhaps they are hitting connection limits, or this could be an issue with the RDS service itself—the RDS instance may be down or the underlying virtual machine (VM) may have a fault, or the issue could be linked to security groups or network access control lists (NACLs) not allowing the end user's connection through. As you can see, without further information, you might need to check in multiple different locations. The first troubleshooting technique is to always gather as much information as required before you start to debug...