Help Center/ Relational Database Service_RDS for PostgreSQL/ Best Practices/ Best Practices for Using PoWA/ Overview
Updated on 2025-07-17 GMT+08:00
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Overview

PoWA is an open-source system used to monitor the performance of RDS for PostgreSQL databases. It consists of the PoWA-archivist, PoWA-collector, and PoWA-web components and obtains performance data through other extensions installed in the RDS for PostgreSQL databases. The key components are as follows:

  • PoWA-archivist: the PostgreSQL extension for collecting performance data obtained by other extensions.
  • PoWA-collector: the daemon that gathers performance metrics from remote PostgreSQL instances on a dedicated repository server.
  • PoWA-web: the web-based user interface displaying performance metrics collected by the PoWA-collector.
  • Other extensions: the sources of performance metric data. They are installed on the target PostgreSQL database.
  • PoWA: the system name.

Security Risk Warning

The following security risks may exist during PoWA deployment and configuration.

  • (Remote mode) When configuring instance performance metric information to be collected in powa-repository, you need to enter the IP address, root username, and connection password of the target instance. You can query related information in the powa_servers table. The connection password is displayed in plaintext.
  • In the PoWA-collector configuration file, the powa-repository connection information does not contain the connection password. It means that the powa-repository connection configuration item for PoWA-collector must be trust.
  • In the PoWA-web configuration file, the root username and connection password of powa-repository (remote mode) or DB instance (local mode) are optional and stored in plaintext.

Before using the PoWA, you need to be aware of the preceding security risks. For details about how to harden security, see the official PoWA documentation.

Other Supported Extensions

In addition to mandatory extensions pg_stat_statements, btree_gist, and PoWA, the following extensions are used for collecting extended performance metrics:

  • pg_qualstats
  • pg_stat_kcache
  • pg_wait_sampling
  • pg_track_settings
  • hypopg

Each of the extensions can collect different extended performance metrics. For details about the extensions supported by RDS for PostgreSQL, see Supported Extensions.

Parent Topic: Best Practices for Using PoWA