An error occurred (Throttling) when calling the DescribeDBInstances operation

[Ashish Chaurasia]

Describe the bug

I have only 10 RDS instances of the t3 class and I'm getting the rate limit exceeded

Expected Behavior

List all the instances of t3 with 0 connection count

Current Behavior

An error occurred (Throttling) when calling the DescribeDBInstances operation (reached max retries: 2): Rate exceeded

An error occurred (Throttling) when calling the DescribeDBInstances operation (reached max retries: 2): Rate exceeded

An error occurred (Throttling) when calling the DescribeDBInstances operation (reached max retries: 2): Rate exceeded

An error occurred (Throttling) when calling the DescribeDBInstances operation (reached max retries: 2): Rate exceeded
^C
~ $ Exception ignored in: <_io.TextIOWrapper name='<stdout>' mode='w' encoding='utf-8'>
BrokenPipeError: [Errno 32] Broken pipe

Reproduction Steps

#!/bin/bash

# Get the list of all RDS instances of instance class starting with "db.t"
instances=$(aws --profile <PROFILE_NAME> --region <REGION> rds describe-db-instances --query "DBInstances[?DBInstanceClass && starts_with(DBInstanceClass, 'db.t3')].DBInstanceIdentifier" --output text)

# Create a temporary file to store the data
temp_file=$(mktemp)

# Calculate the start time as one month ago from today
start_time=$(date -u -v-1m "+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ")

# Loop through each instance and check the average number of connections for the past month
for instance in $instances; do
    connections=$(aws --profile <PROFILE_NAME> --region <REGION> cloudwatch get-metric-statistics \
        --namespace AWS/RDS \
        --metric-name DatabaseConnections \
        --dimensions Name=DBInstanceIdentifier,Value=$instance \
        --start-time "$start_time" \
        --end-time "$(date -u "+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ")" \
        --period 21600 \
	--statistics Average \
        --output text | awk '{print int($2)}' | tail -n1)

    # Check if connections is not empty and greater than or equal to 1
    if [ -n "$connections" ] && [ "$connections" -eq 0 ]; then
        # Fetch other details of the instance
        details=$(aws --profile <PROFILE_NAME> --region <REGION> rds describe-db-instances --db-instance-identifier $instance --output json)
        instanceClass=$(echo $details | jq -r '.DBInstances[0].DBInstanceClass')
        engine=$(echo $details | jq -r '.DBInstances[0].Engine')

        # Append details to the temporary file
        echo -e "$instance,$instanceClass,$engine,$connections" >> "$temp_file"
    fi
done

Possible Solution

No response

Additional Information/Context

No response

CLI version used

aws-cli/2.7.26 Python/3.10.6 Darwin/23.1.0 source/x86_64 prompt/off

Environment details (OS name and version, etc.)

MacOS Sonoma Version 14.1.1

[Ryan F.]

Hi @CloudNinjaDev, thanks for reaching out. I wasn't able to reproduce this. Are you getting the throttling error in the first describe-db-instances operation, or later when you're looping through instances with a connection? Debug logs would be appreciated here. You can get debug logs by adding --debug to your command, and redacting any sensitive information. Thanks!

[github-actions]

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