- Cloud Monitoring
- A monitoring and observability service for AWS resources and applications.
- Enables real-time monitoring of AWS resources, applications, and custom metrics.
- Metric is a variable to monitor (CPUUtilization, NetworkIn, etc..)
- Can create CloudWatch dashboards of metrics
Key Features:
- Collect and track metrics.
- Set alarms and take automated actions.
- Store and access logs for troubleshooting.
- EC2 Instances: CPU utilization, disk I/O, network I/O.
- Default metrics every 5 minutes
- Option for Detailed Monitoring ($$$): metrics every 1 minute
- EBS volumes: Disk Read/Writes
- RDS Databases: CPU utilization, free storage space, read/write IOPS.
- S3 Buckets: Number of requests, latency, and errors., AllRequests
- Lambda Functions: Invocation count, error count, duration.
- Billing:Total Estimated Charge (only in us-east-1)
- Service Limits: how much you’ve been using a service API
- Custom metrics: push your own metrics
- Trigger notifications or automated actions when a metric exceeds a threshold.
- Examples:
- Send an alert if EC2 CPU utilization exceeds 80%.
- Scale out EC2 instances based on demand.
- EC2 Actions: stop, terminate, reboot or recover an EC2 instance
- SNS notifications: send a notification into an SNS topic
- Various options (sampling, %, max, min, etc…)
- Example: create a billing alarm on the CloudWatch Billing metric
- Alarm States: OK. INSUFFICIENT_DATA, ALARM
- Centralized logging for AWS services and applications.
- CloudWatch Logs can collect log from:
- Elastic Beanstalk: collection of logs from application
- ECS: collection from containers
- AWS Lambda: collection from function logs
- CloudTrail based on filter
- CloudWatch log agents: on EC2 machines or on-premises servers
- Route53: Log DNS queries
- Enables real-time monitoring of logs
- Adjustable CloudWatch Logs retention
- By default, no logs from your EC2 instance will go to CloudWatch
- You need to run a CloudWatch agent on EC2 to push the log files you want
- Make sure IAM permissions are correct
- The CloudWatch log agent can be setup on-premises too
- Delivers a stream of system events describing changes in AWS resources.
- Example: Trigger a Lambda function when an EC2 instance state changes.
- Schedule: Cron jobs (scheduled scripts)
- Schedule Every hour => Trigger script on Lambda function
- Event Pattern: Event rules to react to a service doing something
- IAM Root User Sign in Event => SNS Topic with Email Notification
- Trigger Lambda functions, send SQS/SNS messages
- EventBridge is the next evolution of CloudWatch Events
- Default event bus: generated by AWS services (CloudWatch Events)
- Partner event bus: receive events from SaaS service or applications (Zendesk, DataDog, Segment, Auth0…)
- Custom Event buses: for your own applications
- Schema Registry: model event schema
- EventBridge has a different name to mark the new capabilities
- The CloudWatch Events name will be replaced with EventBridge
- Tracks and logs API calls made in your AWS account for auditing and governance.
- Useful for security analysis, compliance, and operational troubleshooting.
- CloudTrail is enabled by default!
- Get an history of events / API calls made within your AWS Account by:
- Console
- SDK
- CLI
- AWS Services
- Can put logs from CloudTrail into CloudWatch Logs or S3
- A trail can be applied to All Regions (default) or a single Region.
- If a resource is deleted in AWS, investigate CloudTrail first!
Key Features:
- Logs API calls across AWS services, including CLI, SDK, and Management Console.
- Tracks who made the call, when, and from where.
- Management Events:
- Operations that are performed on resources in your AWS account
- Examples:
- Configuring security (IAM AttachRolePolicy)
- Configuring rules for routing data (Amazon EC2 CreateSubnet)
- Setting up logging (AWS CloudTrail CreateTrail)
- By default, trails are configured to log management events.
- Can separate Read Events (that don’t modify resources) from Write Events (that may modify resources)
- Data Events:
- By default, data events are not logged (because high volume operations)
- Amazon S3 object-level activity (ex: GetObject, DeleteObject, PutObject): can separate Read and Write Events
- AWS Lambda function execution activity (the Invoke API)
- Enable CloudTrail Insights to detect unusual activity in your account:
- inaccurate resource provisioning
- hitting service limits
- Bursts of AWS IAM actions
- Gaps in periodic maintenance activity
- CloudTrail Insights analyzes normal management events to create a baseline
- And then continuously analyzes write events to detect unusual patterns
- Anomalies appear in the CloudTrail console
- Event is sent to Amazon S3
- An EventBridge event is generated (for automation needs)
- Events are stored for 90 days in CloudTrail
- To keep events beyond this period, log them to S3 and use Athena
- Helps analyze and debug distributed applications by providing request tracing.
- Test locally
- Add log statements everywhere
- Re-deploy in production
Key Features:
- Trace requests across AWS services and custom applications.
- Identify performance bottlenecks and errors.
- Visualize service maps to understand dependencies.
- Troubleshooting performance (bottlenecks)
- Understand dependencies in a microservice architecture
- Pinpoint service issues
- Review request behavior
- Find errors and exceptions
- Are we meeting time SLA?
- Where I am throttled?
- Identify users that are impacted
- Code review and performance profiling service.
- Provides suggestions to improve the performance of applications.
- Identifies the most costly lines of applications.
- It is based on machine learning models long used at Amazon.
- Identifies code errors and risks with automatic code reviews.
- CodeGuru Reviewer: automated code reviews for static code analysis (development)
- CodeGuru Profiler: visibility/recommendations about application performance during runtime (production)
- Uses machine learning to identify:
- Security vulnerabilities.
- Code inefficiencies.
- Best practices violations.
- Provides recommendations to improve code quality.
- Supports Java and Python
- Integrates with GitHub, Bitbucket, and AWS CodeCommit
- Helps understand the runtime behavior of your application
- Example: identify if your application is consuming excessive CPU capacity on a logging routine
- Features:
- Identify and remove code inefficiencies
- Improve application performance (e.g., reduce CPU utilization)
- Decrease compute costs
- Provides heap summary (identify which objects using up memory)
- Anomaly Detection
- Support applications running on AWS or on- premise
- Minimal overhead on application
- Service Health Dashboard is the single place to learn about the availability and operations of AWS services.
- You can view the overall status of AWS services, and you can sign in to view personalized communications about your particular AWS account or organization.
- Shows all regions, all services health
- Shows historical information for each day
- Has an RSS feed you can subscribe to
- https://status.aws.amazon.com/
- AWS Personal Health Dashboard provides alerts and remediation guidance when AWS is experiencing events that may impact you.
- While the Service Health Dashboard displays the general status of AWS services, Personal Health Dashboard gives you a personalized view into the performance and availability of the AWS services underlying your AWS resources.
- The dashboard displays relevant and timely information to help you manage events in progress and provides proactive notification to help you plan for scheduled activities.
- Global service https://phd.aws.amazon.com/
- Shows how AWS outages directly impact you & your AWS resources
- Alert, remediation, proactive, scheduled activities
Service | Key Features |
---|---|
Amazon CloudWatch | Metrics, Alarms, Logs, Events, EventBridge. |
- Metrics: monitor the performance of AWS services and billing metrics | |
- Alarms: automate notification, perform EC2 action, notify to SNS based on metric | |
- Logs: collect log files from EC2 instances, servers, Lambda functions… | |
- Events (or EventBridge): react to events in AWS, or trigger a rule on a schedule | |
AWS CloudTrail | Tracks API calls, detects unusual activity. |
CloudTrail Insights | automated analysis of your CloudTrail Events |
AWS X-Ray | Trace requests made through your distributed applications |
Amazon CodeGuru | automated code reviews and application performance recommendations |
Service Health Dashboard | status of all AWS services across all regions |
Personal Health Dashboard | AWS events that impact your infrastructure |