DMS Operational Review — AWS DevOps Agent Skill¶

Chat tasks Evaluation AWS Database Migration Service Database

A comprehensive AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) operational review and troubleshooting skill for AWS DevOps Agent. Conducts best-practices assessments, health checks, performance diagnostics, cost optimization reviews, and migration cutover guidance.

What It Does¶

When activated via Chat, this skill instructs the DevOps Agent to:

Discover DMS replication instances, tasks, and endpoints in the configured account/regions.
Collect instance configuration, task settings, endpoint connectivity, table statistics, and version data.
Collect 7-day historical CloudWatch metrics and task logs.
Analyze against 5 assessment categories (Instance Health, Task Health, Endpoint Security, Performance, Cost Efficiency) using a weighted 100-point scoring model.
For troubleshooting: classify errors, run targeted diagnostics, and provide root cause analysis.
For cutover planning: validate pre-cutover checklist, guide execution, and document rollback procedures.
Generate a shareable report artifact per environment, named dms-review-<instance-name>-<YYYY-MM-DD>.md.

Agent Types¶

This skill is intended for the following agent types (selected in the Operator Web App at upload time):

Chat tasks — conversational invocation in Chat ("review my DMS environment", "troubleshoot DMS task failure").
Evaluation — proactive operational improvement recommendations.

Select Generic instead if you want the skill available to all agent types.

Prerequisites¶

1. An AWS DevOps Agent Space with the target AWS account¶

You need an existing Agent Space with the target AWS account configured as a cloud source.

2. IAM permissions for DMS read access¶

The Agent Space IAM role needs read-only permissions for DMS resources. Nearly all required actions are already covered by the AIDevOpsAgentAccessPolicy managed policy attached to the DevOps Agent role. The one exception is dms:TestConnection, which must be granted separately — use the CloudFormation template.

For reference, the complete action set used by this skill:

href="#__codelineno-0-1">{ "Version": "2012-10-17", "Statement": [ { "Effect": "Allow", "Action": [ "dms:Describe*", "dms:List*", "dms:TestConnection", "cloudwatch:GetMetricStatistics", "cloudwatch:ListMetrics", "logs:FilterLogEvents", "logs:DescribeLogGroups", "logs:DescribeLogStreams", "ec2:DescribeSecurityGroups", "ec2:DescribeVpcs", "ec2:DescribeSubnets", "health:DescribeEvents", "health:DescribeEventDetails" ], "Resource": "*" } ] }

3. DMS task logging enabled¶

For troubleshooting and log analysis, DMS tasks must have CloudWatch Logs enabled. Tasks with EnableLogging: false will have limited diagnostic capability.

Uploading to AWS DevOps Agent¶

Reference: Uploading a skill

1. Package the skill¶

From the skills/ directory in this repo:

cd skills
zip -r database-migration-service-expertise.zip database-migration-service-expertise/ -i '*.md' '*.txt' '*.json' '*.yaml' '*.yml' '*.xml' '*.csv' '*.tsv' '*.html' '*.htm' '*.png' '*.jpg' '*.jpeg' '*.gif' '*.svg' '*.webp' '*.pdf' -x '*/.claude/*' '*/scripts/*' '*/README.md' '*/.skilleval.yaml' '*/.skilleval.yml' '*/CHANGELOG.md' '*/evals/*'

The resulting database-migration-service-expertise.zip contains:

database-migration-service-expertise/
├── SKILL.md                    # frontmatter + skill instructions (required)
└── references/
    ├── dms-best-practices.md   # comprehensive best practices reference
    ├── dms-validation-checklist.md  # step-by-step validation criteria
    └── dms-version-reference.md     # version lifecycle and known issues

Constraints (enforced at upload time):

Total zip size ≤ 6 MB.
SKILL.md is required and must include name and description frontmatter.
A scripts/ directory is not allowed — uploads containing scripts are rejected.

2. Upload via the Operator Web App¶

Navigate to the Skills page in your Agent Space Operator Web App.
Click Add skill → Upload skill.
Drag and drop database-migration-service-expertise.zip (or browse to it).
Select agent types: Chat tasks and Evaluation (or leave Generic to make it available to all agent types).
Review the validation results.
Click Upload.

3. (Optional) Connect additional observability sources¶

For richer analysis, connect your observability tools to the Agent Space:

Tool	Setup Guide
CloudWatch	Built-in (no setup needed)
Datadog	Connecting Datadog
Dynatrace	Connecting Dynatrace
New Relic	Connecting New Relic
Splunk	Connecting Splunk
Grafana	Connecting Grafana
Custom MCP	Connecting MCP Servers

Usage¶

In the DevOps Agent Chat, use natural language:

"Run a DMS operational review for all instances in us-east-1."
"Review my DMS replication instance prod-migrator for best practices."
"Troubleshoot CDC latency on task oracle-to-aurora-cdc."
"Assess cost optimization opportunities for my DMS environment."
"Help me plan a migration cutover for task full-load-cdc-orders."
"Check DMS version deprecations and recommend upgrades."

The agent will:

Collect all data automatically (no prompts for confirmation).
Cross-reference versions against known issues and deprecation timelines.
Generate a report artifact per environment, named dms-review-<instance-name>-<YYYY-MM-DD>.md.

Skill Contents¶

database-migration-service-expertise/
├── SKILL.md                           # main skill instructions (with frontmatter)
├── README.md                          # this file
├── CHANGELOG.md                       # version history
├── .skilleval.yaml                    # evaluation config
├── references/
│   ├── dms-best-practices.md          # comprehensive DMS best practices
│   ├── dms-validation-checklist.md    # operations review validation criteria
│   └── dms-version-reference.md       # version lifecycle and known bugs
└── evals/                             # evaluation data (not included in upload zip)
    ├── evals.json                     # functional evaluation test cases
    ├── eval_queries.json              # trigger/routing test queries
    ├── benchmark.json                 # functional eval benchmark results
    ├── report.json                    # unified eval report
    ├── trigger_report.json            # trigger eval results
    └── files/
        └── dms-context.json           # mock DMS environment for evals

evals/ is for skill evaluation tracking and is not included in the upload zip.

Assessment Categories¶

#	Category	Weight	Scope
1	Instance Health	25 pts	Status, version, Multi-AZ, public access, storage, encryption
2	Task Health	25 pts	Task status, table errors, CDC latency, logging
3	Endpoint Security	20 pts	SSL mode, Secrets Manager, connectivity, SG rules
4	Performance	15 pts	CPU, memory, swap, disk queue, CDC throughput
5	Cost Efficiency	15 pts	Right-sizing, idle resources, Multi-AZ justification

Additional Capabilities¶

Capability	Description
Troubleshooting	Error classification, targeted diagnostics, log analysis
Migration Cutover	Pre-cutover checklist, execution steps, rollback procedures
Version Management	Deprecation tracking, upgrade guidance, known bug cross-reference
DMS Serverless	Suitability assessment, provisioned vs serverless evaluation
Homogeneous Migration	Native tool alternatives for same-engine migrations
Pre-Migration Assessment	Fleet Advisor, SCT integration, task assessment guidance
Data Validation	Validation failure investigation and remediation

Severity Definitions¶

Severity	Definition	SLA
CRITICAL	Immediate risk to migration integrity, data loss, or security	24–48 hours
HIGH	Significant gap that could lead to task failures	1 week
MEDIUM	Notable improvement opportunity	30 days
LOW	Minor optimization or hardening	When convenient
INFO	Observation, no action required	N/A

License¶

⚠️ This skill is sample code, not intended for production use without additional review and testing. Users should validate all recommendations in a non-production environment first. Always test DMS configuration changes (version upgrades, task setting modifications, instance resizing) in a staging environment before applying to production migrations.