How do I get access to the mysql logs from a RDS instance

Question

How do I get access to the MySQL logs (primarily to take a look at the insert/update/delete statements) from an Amazon RDS instance?

Answer 1

Basically you have to enable the "general_log" parameter in the parameter group of your RDS instance

$ rds-modify-db-parameter-group mydbparametergroup --parameters "name=general_log,value=ON,method=immediate" 

In case you did not apply the parametergroup to the instance:

$ rds-modify-db-instance mydbinstance  --db-parameter-group-name mydbparametergroup

Then access your mysql instance using root:

mysql> select * from mysql.general_log;

See:

AWS Developer Forum - Re: general query log

AWS RDS - Working with DB Parameter Groups

Answer 2

EDIT: 4 years have past since I posted this answer, and it still seems valid. I hope someone from Amazon RDS documentation team would read it and update their documentation.

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I had a really hard time to figure such a simple thing out, because all online information in this regard seems outdated including one in Amazon Docs. Amazon has obviously changed how you do things since now the default parameters cannot be modified, and you need to create a custom set of parameters in order to modify them, including general_log. It is an obvious bug that you can still click the Edit button for default parameters, but when you try to save them, you get an error that default parameters can't be changed.

How you do it now, is that in the Parameters Groups, click on Create DB Parameter Group, and create a new group and select the same DB in 'DB Parameter Group Family' as in the default parameter group. See the attached screen shot. Once done, it'll create a copy identical to the default parameter group. Now edit the parameters, e.g. change general_log to '1'. According to the Docs is should be '0' by default but it is neither '0' nor '1' by default.

Now save it, go back to your instance, click on 'Instance Actions', select 'Modify' and in the setting which will appear, change 'Parameter Group' to your new custom parameter group. It'll take a few moments to apply it, after which you'll need to restart your DB instance.

This is how it is till June 2014. But there is no guarantee that it'll stay like this in future too, since in the technology industry things keep getting updated too fast (many times unnecessarily) but documents and tutorials don't get updated as fast.