What Exactly Is AWS Monitoring?
AWS monitoring is a collection of activities that you may use to ensure the security and performance of your AWS resources and data. To acquire, analyze, and communicate data insights, these techniques rely on a variety of technologies and services. These insights can subsequently be used to discover vulnerabilities and faults, anticipate performance, and optimize setups.
This article will teach you:
- Tools for Third-Party Monitoring on AWS
- Amazon Web Services Cloud Trail
- AWS CloudWatch
- Certificate Manager
- Dashboard for Amazon EC2
- Third-Party Monitoring Tools on AWS
- Cloud Insights from NetApp
- SolarWinds AppOptics
- Zenoss ZenPack \sZabbix
- Weave Scope Steps for AWS Resource Monitoring Success
- Best Practices for AWS Monitoring
- Wherever possible, use automation.
- Create Policies for Determining Priority Levels
- Resolve issues as soon as possible.
- Take Advantage of the Cloud
- Tools for Third-Party Monitoring on AWS
AWS provides a number of services and utilities that you can use to monitor your systems and access. Some of these technologies are already included in existing services, while others are accessible for a fee.
Amazon Web Services CloudTrail
CloudTrail is a service that allows you to trace events throughout your account. The service records event logs and activity logs for your services automatically and stores the data in S3. For the last 90 days, you can access all management events for free. For an extra cost, data events and insights based on your data are also available.
Amazon Web Services CloudWatch
CloudWatch is a service for aggregating, visualizing, and responding to service data. Alarms, which generate alerts based on thresholds for specific metrics, and events, which can automate responses to metric values or system changes, are the two major components of CloudWatch.
Dashboard for Amazon EC2
The Amazon EC2 Dashboard is a monitoring tool for the virtual machine service Amazon EC2. This dashboard can be used to monitor and maintain your EC2 instances and infrastructure. You may use the dashboard to check instance states and service health, control alerts and status reports, view planned events, and evaluate volume and instance metrics.
Third-Party Monitoring Tools on AWS
Many AWS users utilize third-party tools in addition to native tools. These tools are beneficial for decoupling monitoring operations from your principal resources, and they frequently handle hybrid or on-premises resources as well.
Cloud Insights from NetApp
NetApp Cloud Insights is a monitoring tool that allows you to visualize your infrastructure.
It allows you to monitor, optimize, and troubleshoot resources in public, private, and on-premises clouds. Conditional alerts, optimization recommendations, predictive analytics, machine learning-based anomaly detection, and compliance auditing are all included in Cloud Insights.
SolarWinds AppOptics
AppOptics is a tool for supplementing data collected by CloudWatch. It allows you to monitor performance statistics, trend logs, and capacity restrictions. AppOptics can be integrated with other AWS services to produce automated evaluations of your operations. AppOptics also contains tools that allow you to manage many Amazon Web Services accounts from a single interface.
ZenPack by Zenoss
ZenPack is an open source utility for aggregating CloudWatch metrics and data from external resources. It has a simple graphical user interface (GUI) and is compatible with a number of AWS services. S3, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and Amazon Suite are among these offerings.
Zabbix
Zabbix is a free and open source tool for gathering metrics from AWS and other applications, services, and databases. Dashboards, alarm escalation, and a strong online network of help are all included. Zabbix has the disadvantage of not being able to ingest data or generate performance reports.
Weave Dimensions
Weave Scope is an open source tool for monitoring and visualizing microservices. It has service discovery characteristics and is compatible with Elastic Container Services (ECS). Weave Scope is made up of three parts (an interface, an app, and a probe) that allow you to troubleshoot service performance in real time.
Steps to AWS Resource Monitoring Success
Phase A: Determine Your AWS Monitoring Requirements
Before incorporating monitoring into your pipeline or making modifications to your current workflow, you should thoroughly evaluate your current infrastructure, tooling, resources, and skill set. Taking the time to examine your circumstances might assist you in developing a strategy that is tailored to your specific requirements.
Step 1: evaluation questions
Here are some essential topics to consider when considering your AWS monitoring requirements:
Where is your network’s infrastructure located? Is it on-site? Do you want a separate monitoring system for each environment, or do you want to combine on-premise and cloud monitoring in a single tool?
Compliance—what are your present policies on compliance? What legal ramifications must you bear in order to meet industry standards? Can you implement a SaaS monitoring and logging solution while being compliant?
Inventory—do you need a new tool for AWS monitoring, or will your current stack suffice?
Complexity—what are the challenges and expenses associated with removing all legacy agents from all servers in order to make room for the installation of new agents?
Metrics—do you know which metrics are definitely necessary to monitor and which may be redundant?
Step 2: Create a strategy for tagging AWS resources.
Once you’ve determined your existing monitoring requirements and prioritized metrics, you can begin building a plan for labeling AWS resources. Tags assist you in keeping track of your resources as well as monitoring usage and activity.
It can take some effort to figure out how to categorize resources if you don’t have a tagging system in place. While each project and organization is distinct, it is critical to develop a tagging system that can be used by a diverse range of professionals and collaborators. As a result, if monitoring insights are required, all relevant stakeholders have access to them.
Phase B: Choose the Best Solution for Your Company
After reviewing your requirements and establishing a tagging system for AWS resources, you can hunt for a solution that meets your requirements. It is frequently more productive to begin with a simple solution and then expand as needed.
Step 3: Begin with Amazon CloudWatch.
CloudWatch metrics can assist you in monitoring almost any AWS resource. CloudWatch has a number of pre-built metrics, such as DiskQueueLength and CPUUtilization. When linked with CloudWatch, some AWS services, such as RDS and EC2, can give extra counters.
CloudWatch counters enable you to create dashboards that you may use to visualize data. CloudWatch features an alerting system that alerts you when events occur, in addition to counters and dashboards.
Step 4: Make use of best-of-breed solutions.
When it comes to visibility, the more resource types you monitor, the more you can ensure your assets’ performance and safety. However, not all monitoring systems are capable of providing visibility into all resources. Some monitoring systems are intended for infrastructure, whereas others are intended for network traffic.
In order to maintain productivity, you should also consider adding a tool to consolidate the stack. If you decide to extend existing systems by installing plugins or interacting with APIs, you must enable AWS integration and ensure that each modification conforms with any regulatory standards that you are legally obligated to enforce.
Capture Logs (Phase C)
After you’ve configured your monitoring solution or stack, you should decide which logs to capture and how to do so. Logs are extremely useful for tracking compliance requirements and troubleshooting issues.
Here’s a list of logs you might wish to keep track of:
- Database logs can assist you in detecting queries that are taking too long to execute.
- Application logs—they highlight application failures.
- AWS CloudTrail detects AWS API calls.
- Elastic Load Balancing and host logs may indicate changes in availability or latency.
Best Practices for AWS Monitoring
Make use of Automation Whenever Possible
AWS production deployments are often too large and dynamic to manually monitor. The volume of metrics and log data collected is too vast for humans to analyze efficiently.
Create Policies for Determining Priority Levels
Prioritizing monitoring duties helps to guarantee that key services continue to operate and data is secured. Additionally, prioritizing alerts or alert categories helps IT personnel deploy their time and resources more effectively.
Take Advantage of the Cloud
Cloud infrastructures are adaptable, allowing you to experiment with configuration changes without disrupting services. When optimizing based on analytics, take the time to test your configurations. This allows you to test whether changes are more efficient before putting them in production.
NetApp Cloud Insights for AWS Monitoring
NetApp Cloud Insights is an infrastructure monitoring solution that provides you with a comprehensive view of your whole infrastructure. You may use Cloud Insights to monitor, diagnose, and optimize all of your resources, including public clouds and private data centers.
NetApp Cloud Insights, for example, enables you to automatically design topologies, correlate metrics, discover greedy or degraded resources, and notify on unusual user behavior.
