AWS Monitoring Using CloudWatch
By Nimika Grover | May 2, 2023
Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a wide range of services that can be used to build and operate applications and infrastructure in the cloud. However, with the increasing complexity of cloud environments, it can be challenging to ensure that everything is running as expected. This is where Amazon CloudWatch comes in, a monitoring service that provides metrics and logs about AWS resources and applications.
In this blog post, we’ll provide an overview of CloudWatch monitoring and how to set it up for your AWS resources.
What is CloudWatch?
Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service that provides metrics and logs about AWS resources and applications. CloudWatch can monitor a wide range of AWS services, including EC2 instances, RDS databases, Elastic Load Balancers, and more. Additionally, CloudWatch can monitor custom metrics, logs, and events generated by your own applications.
CloudWatch provides a centralized view of your AWS resources, allowing you to monitor and troubleshoot issues across your entire environment. With CloudWatch, you can set alarms and notifications to alert you when specific metrics exceed predefined thresholds, making it easier to detect and respond to issues before they impact your users.
How to set up CloudWatch Monitoring?
Setting up CloudWatch monitoring is a straightforward process.
- First, you need to enable monitoring for the AWS resources you want to monitor. This can be done through the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, or the AWS SDKs. Once enabled, CloudWatch will begin collecting metrics and logs about those resources.
- Next, you can create alarms in CloudWatch to notify you when specific metrics exceed predefined thresholds. For example, you might want to create an alarm to notify you when an EC2 instance’s CPU usage exceeds 80% for more than five minutes. You can also create composite alarms that combine multiple metrics and conditions to trigger an alarm.
- Finally, you can use CloudWatch Logs to collect, monitor, and analyse logs from your applications and services. CloudWatch Logs can ingest logs from a wide range of sources, including EC2 instances, Lambda functions, and CloudTrail. You can then use CloudWatch Metrics to create custom metrics based on the log data, and set alarms and notifications based on those metrics.
Best Practises for CloudWatch Monitoring
- Enable monitoring for all relevant resources: Ensure that monitoring is enabled for all AWS resources that you want to monitor, including EC2 instances, RDS databases, and Elastic Load Balancers.
- Use standard CloudWatch metrics: CloudWatch provides a range of standard metrics for AWS services, which can be used to monitor resource utilization, error rates, and more.
- Create custom metrics: Use CloudWatch Metrics to create custom metrics based on your application and business needs. Custom metrics can be used to monitor application-specific events and performance.
- Set alarms and notifications: Use CloudWatch Alarms to notify you when specific metrics exceed predefined thresholds. Set up notifications to receive alerts via email, SMS, or other means.
- Use CloudWatch Logs: Use CloudWatch Logs to collect, monitor, and analyse logs from your applications and services. Use CloudWatch Metrics to create custom metrics based on the log data, and set alarms and notifications based on those metrics.
Conclusion
In summary, Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service that provides metrics and logs about AWS resources and applications. With CloudWatch, you can monitor a wide range of AWS services, as well as custom metrics, logs, and events generated by your own applications. By following best practices for CloudWatch monitoring, you can ensure that your AWS resources are running as expected and respond quickly to issues when they arise.