Due to the high demand for AWS cloud, users also need monitoring tools to effectively handle and monitor their cloud resources. This post covers the many monitoring tools available for your AWS resources and some best practices to remember.
What Is AWS Monitoring?
AWS monitoring is a set of techniques aligned with key principles of AWS and intended to assure the safety and performance of your AWS data and resources. These methods use various tools and services to gather, analyze, and share data insights. These insights can then be utilized to identify vulnerabilities and defects, predict performance, and optimize configurations.
Why Monitor AWS Resources?
Ensuring your apps and infrastructure always function as intended is the main objective of AWS cloud monitoring. The following are some benefits of AWS monitoring:
- Make sure your AWS public cloud meets your workload requirements. You can monitor your AWS resources, including events, application performance, infrastructure configuration, and regulatory compliance.
- Utilize a single platform to track your AWS services‘ health and manage them easily.
- Look for anomalies in performance, security, and operational excellence.
- Gather, examine, and apply insights supported by data with significant business value.
- In a cloud environment, stay in compliance with regulations.
- Install automated procedures to deal with unusual situations before they get out of hand or harm customer experiences.
- Pay attention to hybrid clouds and on-premises configurations that are linked to your AWS public cloud.
- To prevent overspending, monitor how scaling and other engineering choices affect your AWS budget.
In the end, monitoring your AWS environments will assist you in identifying areas that require improvement in order to maximize expenses, efficiency, and ROI.
AWS Monitoring Best Practices
The following best practices can assist you in effectively troubleshooting and ensuring that no resources are missed when monitoring your AWS resources.
- Wherever possible, use automation.
Manufacturing Usually, AWS deployments are too big and dynamic for manual monitoring. Humans cannot effectively examine the large volume of measurements and log data collected. You should automate most of your monitoring tasks to ensure that crucial information is not missed and that responses are timely.
- Establish Guidelines to Establish Priority Levels
Setting monitoring chores as a top priority helps guarantee that data is safeguarded and that vital services continue to run. IT teams can allocate their time and resources more efficiently by prioritizing alerts or alert categories.
- Address Issues Early On
Monitoring data should be employed to address problems such as possible service outages proactively. Managing a service outage is far more complex than scaling resources or limiting traffic beforehand. Additionally, you can save money and resources by handling such problems early on.
- Make the Most of the Cloud
Because cloud environments are adaptable, you can experiment with configuration changes without impacting services. Spend some time testing your configurations while optimizing using metrics. In this manner, before putting modifications into production, you may confirm whether they are more effective.
Steps for Successful AWS Resource Monitoring
The ideal strategy for successfully implementing AWS resource monitoring is to follow a staged approach. For each tool you suggest in the monitoring process, numerous crucial elements must be considered, including compliance issues, compatibility issues, and already existing infrastructure.
Phase 1: Pre-evaluation
Some crucial questions that will later be helpful for the remainder of the process can be answered when you conduct a pre-assessment of the monitoring requirements.
Before proceeding, you need to understand several crucial topics, including whether your network is on-premises or in the cloud, your present security rules, KPIs you should monitor, and the industry standards you must adhere to.
Phase 2: Plan
After completing the review, the following step is strategically organizing the monitoring process. You need to use a tagging strategy to enhance the monitoring process. Tags help organize the log events for data segmentation and filtering. These tags are metadata that transmit information associated with an event and is easily integrated into any system.
Phase 3: Appropriate Instrument
Your monitoring needs and the services offered by AWS will determine which tools are ideal for you to use. When selecting an AWS monitoring solution, it’s critical to consider the support for several services. For example, you should consider all the options and check if a tool supports Amazon EC2 before choosing it.
Phase 4: Aggregation of Logs
After selecting the tool, you have to decide on the metrics and logs to record or gather. One of the many different kinds of logs will need to be monitored, depending on the AWS resource.
First-party AWS Monitoring Tools
Third-party AWS monitoring solutions are either included by AWS or are available as an add-on. They facilitate metrics tracking resource management and even boost AWS service efficiency.
1. AWS Cloudtrail
CloudTrail is an operational service offered by AWS at the moment of account login. It lets you keep an eye on different account activities and boost productivity. CloudTrail records all of the actions and offers data on other aspects. You can easily review every event that has happened via the console by using the event history link.
Determine who or what performed each activity, what resources were used, when the event occurred, and other details to evaluate and respond to activity in your AWS account.You may use CloudTrail to find out who altered your apps.
AWS The primary purpose of CloudTrail is to monitor activity within your AWS environment. Because CloudTrail can provide a history of activities in your AWS environment, it also helps with compliance.
2. AWS CloudWatch
AWS The most basic and essential service offered by AWS is CloudWatch. Although CloudWatch offers some in-depth monitoring features you might need to pay for, it is usually free. This AWS native utility provides helpful details about the services accessible through your AWS account. One of the essential features of your AWS ClooudWatch is CloudWatch Alarms.
Alarms for CloudWatch metrics can be set up. For instance, you can set up an alert for the CPU usage of an EC2 instance. As a result, an alert will sound if the CPU use of your instance surpasses a specific threshold. Several services may also be connected with this warning to fix the application environment or notify the account user automatically.
3. The EC2 Dashboard
Amazon EC2 offers flexible and scalable computing capacity in the AWS cloud environment. Its best feature is Amazon EC2’s flexible pricing approach that accounts for use cases. Additionally, it allows you to build up numerous virtual servers with enhanced security, networking, and storage.
As a result, monitoring several variables, such as instances, network activity, security, and others, becomes crucial. You may start and monitor each instance using the resources the EC2 dashboard provides. For effective EC2 monitoring and the overall health of numerous services, you may also configure alarms, monitor instance status, and keep an eye on scheduled events.
4. Configuring AWS
AWS Config is an additional monitoring tool. It can be utilized to build rules that analyze, verify, and assess the setup of your AWS resources. This means the AWS Config dashboard does not display metrics or logs. Alternatively, you can set rules that will be highlighted in the Configuration panel if they are broken.
5. Certificate Manager
This tool allows you to manage multiple security certifications and monitor their effectiveness. To ensure data transmission safety, encryption-based protocols such as secure sockets layer (SSL) and transport layer security (TLS) certificates encrypt the data sent between the browser and the server.
With the aid of a certificate manager, you can add, install, activate, and manage this kind of certification for your systems. There are several third-party AWS monitoring tools available alongside these official ones that you may use to keep tabs on your resources.
Third-Party AWS Monitoring Tools
There are a lot of helpful features and capabilities in AWS native monitoring for tracking AWS performance. Furthermore, functionality is offered by the numerous third-party programs that are currently on the market. We can go over a couple of those superior tools.
1. Datadog
The application, platform, and service performance can be enhanced by using Datadog’s array of application monitoring services, which allow users to quickly search, filter, and review logs for debugging and open-ended data analysis.
Datadog’s more than 350 vendor-supported APIs (including over 75 AWS service connections) make collecting data and events simple across the DevOps stack. Datadog provides a comprehensive understanding of both on-premises and cloud settings on the same platform.
Engineering teams can look into application performance problems that impact a single server or a big cluster using the Datadog platform. Additionally, customers can utilize the service to share KPIs and SLA/SLO adherence with executives, technical teams, and external stakeholders.
2. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
With SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM), you can keep tabs on every server and application in your hybrid, public cloud, or on-premises IT infrastructure. It finds the slow programs that are causing end-user and business service outages, automatically maps the relationships between your apps, and identifies the root causes of application issues at various IT stack levels.
It enables server performance monitoring in public, private, and hybrid environments. With the help of the service and application manager, you can quickly keep tabs on any service and even make your own custom statistics display templates.
3. Zabbix
This open-source AWS monitoring tool collects data from numerous databases, programs, and resources. Zabbix has a large online community that offers reliable assistance and a dashboard with many features. One downside of the program is that it can’t input data or even make analytical reports.
Zabbix is among the best monitoring systems due to its extensive feature set. Its agent-less technology allows it to keep tabs on practically anything running any OS.
4. NetApp Cloud Insights
If you want to keep tabs on your system, you can use NetApp Cloud Insights. It can also be used to keep an eye on, improve, and troubleshoot resources that are housed in both private and public clouds.
Cloud Insights offers conditional warnings; machine learning-based anomaly detection, predictive analytics, optimization suggestions, and compliance auditing.
5. The New Relic
With their wide range of monitoring tools, New Relic should be able to meet most requests. New Relic Infrastructure, a more “traditional” infrastructure monitoring module, and New Relic APM, a tool for measuring application performance, are notable among these products.
Integrating New Relic APM with Infrastructure gives you a bird’s-eye view of your hosts, servers, and the apps and services that rely on them. Keeping tabs on the inventory configuration state allows you to easily detect changes that could affect system and application performance, which is especially useful as your applications and infrastructure expand.
The Bottom Line
Numerous tools are available for monitoring your AWS system, all of which are excellent options. Because they are all unique instruments, comparing them might be challenging. Examine the distinctive features of many tools; perhaps even try a couple before selecting one; you’ll be rewarded with the one that best suits your needs. Improve your abilities and complete the AWS DevOps Course in Pune with our professionally taught course!
