This overview of AWS monitoring will cover the essential managed services and the basics of their implementation.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the most popular public cloud, with 175 services and counting. A key element of a successful cloud operation is gaining visibility into what is running where, what issues are occurring, and dealing with them, preferably automatically. In this article, I’ll discuss the basics of AWS monitoring, including Amazon services that can assist with monitoring, key metrics to watch for the most popular Amazon services, and a special focus on monitoring EC2 environments, which are the basis for most Amazon deployments. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a top cloud service vendor, providing hundreds of services for cloud users worldwide. AWS offers several monitoring services, built to work natively with other AWS solutions while integrating with third-party tools. AWS provides two widely used monitoring services: AWS CloudWatch—a comprehensive monitoring solution designed to provide operational and security capabilities for DevOps teams, security professionals, and developers. Notable CloudWatch features include automated incident response, operational insights, troubleshooting, anomaly detection, and metric visualization. You can deploy CloudWatch on-premises as well as in the cloud. AWS CloudTrail—a monitoring tool designed for tracking API usage and user activity across the AWS ecosystem. AWS CloutTrail tracks user actions and then automatically stores and records these event logs. You can log activities such as user identification, IP addresses, and dates and times during user interactions. When monitoring your environment, it is important to choose certain metrics to focus on. Below are metrics you can consider when monitoring Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), and AWS Lambda. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) lets you easily provision and scale infrastructure resources, on-demand. The main resource EC2 provides is called an EC2 instance, which is essentially a virtual server provisioned in the AWS cloud. There is a wide range of EC2 instance types, each providing different CPU, storage, network capacity, and memory. EC2 integrates natively with AWS monitoring tools, as well as with Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling, which help you optimize usage and costs.
