I asked this question earlier but somehow the question was closed. Reposting it with additional details.

I had an issue in the past with too many connections in my Amazon MySQL RDS. I was unable to connect as an admin to investigate the problem.

Flush Host was ineffective.

Tried to increase the connection limit in Parameter group; It didn’t work because the system remained in “Updating” mode for a longer period.

Finally, we ended up restarting the instance, and that resolved the problem.

However, all I want to know is how a DBA can connect when there are too many connections, since AWS RDS does not allow superuser privileges.

More information: Clients connect to the application; however those clients aren’t exceeding more than 150 at a time. The Connection limit configured is over 1500. It’s the microservices that’s causing the issue.

There are many pods connecting to ProxySQL. The ProxySQL redirects the reads and writes to RDS. I see from Kubenav logs, most of the queries are from the authentication service. The problem is I was not able to connect to the RDS at all in such scenarios. I want a way to get in and kill the sessions. Increasing the limit of connections didn’t help.