What if?
Imagine you have a website on an EC2 instance where you sell your products, the site stops working, and you don’t realize it until a week later when you log into your account. Your customers may have wanted to access your site to make many purchases then, which would be a loss for your business.
Let’s look at another example; imagine you are the system administrator of a company, inexplicably a system hosted in the cloud that the sales department uses has had intermittent failures all week. The company manager calls you to find out what is happening. What answer could you give if no one has reported anything until today?
Well, that’s what we have CloudWatch for!
“CloudWatch helps us monitor and ensure that all our workloads are running smoothly by collecting operational and monitoring data that is delivered in the form of logs, metrics, and events.”
In CloudWatch, we can analyze the behavior of our developments and send alerts when unexpected behaviors require some action from us.
CloudWatch helps us monitor and ensure that all our workloads are running smoothly.
How can we do this with CloudWatch?
AWS CloudWatch Metrics
CloudWatch gives us the ability to create metrics for each AWS service and thus be able to monitor them.
Metrics are numerically expressed data that, through graphs, we can analyze the behavior of our services. For example, we can monitor the CPU utilization of an EC2 instance, or the number of objects stored in S3 with CloudWatch metrics, adding filters or attributes to the metric (instance ID, custom time range).
AWS CloudWatch Alarms
Alarms are used to trigger notifications of any metric.
Example of alarm:
Check the status of an EC2 instance.
Each time the metric exceeds a threshold that we have configured, the CloudWatch alarm can be triggered, and actions can be performed with them
Examples of actions:
Trigger an increment or decrement of EC2 instances or send a notification by SNS.
Benefits
Monitoring your account in one application
You can see how all your services are performing from CloudWatch, which makes it easy to see what’s going on in your account and resolve issues quickly.
Improved performance and resource optimization
With CloudWatch, we can set alarms to find unexpected behaviors that help us reduce resources to optimize costs or increase resources to improve performance.
Free Layer
With CloudWatch, we have free service metrics automatically.
Such as:
– Basic monitoring metrics.
– 3 Dashboards with up to 50 metrics each.
– 10 alarm metrics.
– 5GB of Logs and more!
