What is AWS Monitoring? Best Practices and Metrics

Amazon Web Services (AWS) monitoring is the practice of continuously tracking and analyzing the performance and health of your AWS resources and applications to ensure they operate optimally and meet your business needs. Effective AWS monitoring is crucial for maintaining the reliability, security, and cost-efficiency of your cloud infrastructure. Here are some best practices and key metrics to consider when monitoring AWS resources:

Best Practices for AWS Monitoring:  marketwatchmedia

Define Monitoring Objectives: Start by defining your monitoring objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs). Determine what aspects of your AWS environment you need to monitor to meet your business and operational goals.

Select the Right AWS Monitoring Tools: AWS provides various monitoring and observability services, such as Amazon CloudWatch, AWS X-Ray, and AWS Config. Choose the tools that align with your monitoring objectives.

Implement a Centralized Logging Solution: Use services like Amazon CloudWatch Logs, AWS CloudTrail, or third-party solutions to collect and analyze logs for security, compliance, and troubleshooting.

Set Up Custom Dashboards: Create custom dashboards in Amazon CloudWatch to display relevant metrics and alarms for quick visibility into the health and performance of your resources.

Automate Alarms: Set up alarms in CloudWatch to notify you of abnormal or unhealthy conditions in your AWS resources. These alarms can trigger notifications via email, SMS, or integration with other services.

Use AWS Trusted Advisor: AWS Trusted Advisor provides recommendations for cost optimization, security, and performance improvements based on your AWS usage.

Implement Auto Scaling: Use Auto Scaling groups to automatically adjust the number of instances in response to changes in resource demand. Monitor scaling activities to ensure they are functioning correctly.

Analyze Application Performance: Utilize AWS X-Ray to trace and analyze application performance, identifying bottlenecks and issues in distributed applications.

Ensure Security Monitoring: Set up AWS Config rules and security group flow logs to monitor and detect unauthorized or potentially malicious activity in your AWS environment.

Regularly Review and Optimize: Continuously review your monitoring strategy and adjust it as your infrastructure evolves. Regularly optimize your resources and configurations based on monitoring data.

Key Metrics for AWS Monitoring:

Compute Resources: Monitor metrics related to your EC2 instances, such as CPU utilization, memory usage, network traffic, and disk I/O.

Database Performance: Track metrics like query performance, connection count, and database instance health for Amazon RDS or DynamoDB.

Storage Metrics: Keep an eye on storage utilization, latency, and input/output operations for services like Amazon S3, EBS volumes, and more.

Network Metrics: Monitor network traffic, error rates, and latency for services using VPC, ELB, and other network-related components.

Application Metrics: Capture application-specific metrics using CloudWatch custom metrics and AWS X-Ray for tracing requests and identifying performance bottlenecks.

Cost and Resource Optimization: Monitor cost-related metrics to identify opportunities for cost savings, such as underutilized resources or inefficient configurations.

Security and Compliance: Use AWS Config to track configuration changes, and CloudTrail to monitor API activity for potential security and compliance violations.

Service Health: Check the health status of AWS services using the AWS Service Health Dashboard and CloudWatch alarms to be alerted to any service disruptions.

Logs and Events: Analyze logs and events to troubleshoot issues, monitor security events, and gain insights into resource behavior.

User and Application Authentication: Monitor IAM and AWS Cognito for unusual authentication and authorization patterns.

AWS monitoring is an ongoing process that helps you maintain a healthy and efficient cloud environment while ensuring the security and availability of your applications and resources. Regularly reviewing and optimizing your monitoring strategy is essential to adapt to changing needs and challenges.

Define Monitoring Objectives

Monitoring objectives are specific goals and purposes that organizations define to ensure the effective and efficient operation of their systems, services, and infrastructure. These objectives guide the monitoring practices and tools used to track the performance, health, and security of IT resources. Monitoring objectives vary depending on the nature of the environment and the organization's goals, but they generally fall into several broad categories:

Performance Monitoring: Ensure that IT resources, applications, and services are performing optimally. Performance monitoring objectives may include tracking metrics like response times, throughput, and resource utilization to meet service level agreements (SLAs) and deliver a positive user experience.

Availability Monitoring: Guarantee that critical systems and services are accessible and available to users and customers. Availability objectives may focus on minimizing downtime and ensuring high system uptime.

Security Monitoring: Detect and respond to security threats, vulnerabilities, and breaches in real-time or proactively. Security monitoring objectives aim to safeguard data, infrastructure, and services against unauthorized access and malicious activities.

Capacity Planning: Anticipate and plan for resource growth and changes in demand. Capacity planning objectives involve tracking resource utilization and trends to prevent performance degradation and ensure that systems can scale to meet future needs.

Cost Optimization: Monitor resource utilization, waste, and expenses to identify opportunities for cost savings and efficiency improvements. Cost optimization objectives seek to reduce unnecessary expenses while maintaining or improving performance.

Compliance and Governance: Ensure that systems and processes adhere to regulatory, industry, and internal compliance standards. Compliance and governance objectives may involve tracking configuration changes, access control, and audit trails.

Troubleshooting and Diagnostics: Quickly identify and resolve issues and errors within the infrastructure or applications. Monitoring objectives for troubleshooting aim to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) and maintain system reliability.

User Experience Monitoring: Assess the end-user experience by monitoring factors like page load times, application responsiveness, and transaction success rates to improve user satisfaction.

Resource Utilization and Efficiency: Track resource consumption, such as CPU, memory, storage, and network usage, to identify overutilized or underutilized resources and optimize resource allocation.

Business and Operational Insights: Gather data and metrics that provide insights into the operational and business aspects of the organization, helping to make data-driven decisions and improvements.

Monitoring objectives should align with an organization's overall business and IT goals. They provide clear direction for selecting monitoring tools, configuring alerts and notifications, and establishing the appropriate thresholds and benchmarks. By defining and prioritizing these objectives, organizations can create an effective monitoring strategy that supports their specific needs and objectives.

Set Up Custom Dashboards:

Setting up custom dashboards is a key aspect of effective monitoring in AWS, as it provides a consolidated view of the most important metrics and data points related to your infrastructure and applications. These dashboards can help you quickly assess the health and performance of your resources. Here's how you can set up custom dashboards in AWS using Amazon CloudWatch:

Sign in to the AWS Management Console: Go to the AWS Management Console (https://aws.amazon.com/console/) and sign in to your AWS account.

Open Amazon CloudWatch: Navigate to the Amazon CloudWatch service by searching for "CloudWatch" in the AWS Management Console's search bar.

Create a Custom Dashboard:

In the CloudWatch dashboard, click on "Dashboards" in the left navigation pane.

Click the "Create dashboard" button.

Name Your Dashboard: Give your dashboard a meaningful name that reflects its purpose, such as "Production Application Dashboard" or "Dev/Test Environment Dashboard."

Add Widgets: You can add widgets to your custom dashboard to display specific metrics and data. There are various types of widgets available, such as line charts, stacked area charts, and text widgets. To add widgets:

Click the "Add widget" button.

Choose the type of widget you want to add.

Configure the widget to display the metrics and data you are interested in. You can choose metrics from CloudWatch or from other AWS services, such as EC2, RDS, or Lambda.

Configure Widgets: Each widget has its own configuration settings, where you can specify the following:

Metrics: Select the metrics you want to display in the widget.

Title: Provide a title for the widget to describe its content.

Period: Set the time period for which data should be displayed (e.g., last 1 hour, last 24 hours).

Y-Axis Scale: Adjust the scale of the Y-axis to fit your data.

Annotations: Add annotations to the widget to highlight specific events or thresholds.

Organize Widgets: Drag and drop widgets on your dashboard to arrange them in a way that makes sense for your monitoring needs. You can also resize widgets to fit your layout preferences.

 

Save the Dashboard: After you've configured your custom dashboard with the desired widgets, click the "Create dashboard" button to save it.

View and Share the Dashboard: You can now view your custom dashboard, which will display the real-time metrics and data you've configured. You can also share the dashboard with other users or teams by generating a shareable link.

Edit and Update: You can edit and update your custom dashboard at any time. Simply go to the "Dashboards" section in CloudWatch, select your dashboard, and click the "Actions" button to make changes or add new widgets.

Custom dashboards provide a centralized view of relevant metrics, making it easier to monitor the health and performance of your AWS resources. Regularly reviewing and updating your dashboards can help you stay informed and make informed decisions about your AWS environment.