Amazon Web Services offers Redshift to cater to the need of a fully managed data warehouse service. It performs data queries on different computer resources called nodes and a group of nodes is known as clusters. Moreover, Redshift automatically takes snapshots of the cluster nodes for the backup just like Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Relational Database Service (RDS).
Why is it important for your Amazon Redshift clusters to have automated snapshots enabled?
AWS provisions users to enable automated snapshot retention period. Also, AWS automatically takes snapshots of your Redshift clusters usually in every 8 hours or every 5 GB per node of changes, or whichever happens first. These snapshots will be deleted at the end of the retention period.
By default, the retention period is set to one day but you can modify it with the help of Amazon Redshift console or programmatically by using the Amazon Redshift API or CLI. It is recommended for users to ensure that retention period value is greater than 0. To avoid data loss and hampering of day-to-day operations, the automated snapshot becomes an effective way to create a backup of your data stored in your data warehouses.
Ensure that automated snapshot retention period of your Redshift clusters is not set to zero
Only Amazon Redshift can delete an automated snapshot; you can’t manually delete them. Amazon Redshift removes automated snapshots at the end of their retention period when you disable automatic cluster snapshots. If you want to keep an automated snapshot for a longer period of time, you can create a manual copy of a snapshot.
Centilytics have several dedicated checks for Amazon Redshift Cluster. You can determine the automated snapshot retention period of Amazon Redshift Clusters with one of our featured checks. This check monitors the retention period and alerts you if it is set to be less than 1.
Insight descriptions:
There can be 3 possible scenarios:
| Severity | Description |
 Critical |
This indication will pop up when the Redshift cluster does not have automated snapshots enabled. |
 WARNING |
This indication will pop when the Redshift clusters have 0 backup retention days. |
 OK |
This indication will be displayed when the automated snapshot retention period is greater than 0. |
Description of further columns are as follows:
- Account Id: This column shows the respective account ID of the user’s account.
- Account Name: This column shows the Account Id of the user’s account.
- Region: This column shows the region in which the resources exist.
- Identifier: This column shows the name of your Redshift cluster snapshots.
- Snapshot enabled: This column indicates the status of snapshots for your Redshift clusters.
- Retention days: This column shows the retention period of the backup to be taken.
- Snapshot Identifier: This column shows the ARN (Amazon Resource Number) of the resource.
Filters applicable:
| Filter Name | Description |
| Account Id | Applying the account Id filter will display data for the selected account Id. |
| Region | Applying the region filter will display data according to the selected region. |
| Severity | Applying severity filter will display data according to the selected severity type. This means, selecting ‘Critical’ will display all resources with Critical severity. Same will be the case for Warning and Ok severity types. |
| Resource Tags | Applying resource tags filter will display those resources which have been assigned the selected resource tag. For example, a user has tagged some resource by a tag named ‘environment‘. Then, selecting an environment from the resource tags filter will display all the resources with the tag name environment. |
| Resource Tags Value | Applying resource tags value filter will display data which will have the selected resource tag value. For e.g. – Let’s say a user has tagged some resource by a tag named environment and has a value say production (environment: production).
Hence, the user can view data of all the resources which are tagged as “environment: production”. The user can use the tag value filter only when a tag name has been provided. |
Read more about automated snapshots here.