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Amazon Athena introduces system tables for observability, auditing, and usage analytics

Published
November 9, 2026
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/11/athena-system-tables/

Amazon Athena System Tables

Amazon Athena now offers system tables that automatically capture your usage data for observability, usage analysis, and audit use cases. When enabled, usage data is available within minutes of query completion across your workgroups and stored as service-managed, read-only Iceberg tables on Amazon S3.

Key Features

  • Usage data available within minutes of query completion.
  • Stored as service-managed, read-only Iceberg tables on Amazon S3.
  • Configurable retention for usage data.
  • Query usage data directly with Athena.
  • AWS manages tables, including schema definition, partitioning, compaction, and snapshot maintenance.
  • Data available as Iceberg tables for querying with Athena, DuckDB, Amazon Redshift, Amazon EMR, or any Iceberg-compatible engine.
  • Usage data accessible through APIs, CloudWatch metrics, CloudTrail logs, and Iceberg tables.
  • AWS Agent Toolkit provides skills for querying system tables to surface usage patterns and optimization recommendations.

What to do

  • Enable system tables from the Athena console or API.
  • Query usage data directly with Athena or any Iceberg-compatible engine.
  • Build cost allocation dashboards using simple SQL statements.
  • Surface usage patterns and optimization recommendations with the AWS Agent Toolkit.

Source: AWS release notes




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