Cloud Monitoring

Amazon CloudWatch Metrics

• CloudWatch provides metrics for every services in AWS
• Metric is a variable to monitor ( CPUUtilization, Networking...)
• Metrics have timestamps
• Can create CloudWatch dashboards of metrics

Important Metrics

• EC2 instances: CPU Utilization, Status Checks, Network (not RAM)
• Default metrics every 5 minutes
• Option for Detailed Monitoring ($$$): metrics every 1 minute
• EBS volumes: Disk Read/Writes
• S3 buckets: BucketSizeBytes, NumberOfObjects, AllRequests
• Billing: Total Estimated Charge (only in us-east-1)
• Service Limits: how many you've been using a service API
• Custom mertics: push your own metrics

Amazon CloudWatch Alarms

• Alarms are used to trigger notifications for any metric
• Alarms actions
• Auto Scaling: increase or decrease EC2 instances "desired" count
• 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...)
• Can choose the period on which to evaluate an alarm
• Example: create a billing alarm on the CloudWatch Billing metric
• Alarm States: OK, INSUFFICIENT_DATA, ALARM

Amazon CloudWatch Logs

• 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

CloudWatch Logs for EC2

• 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

Amazon EventBridge (formerly CloudWatch Events)

• Schedule: Cron jobs (Scheduled scripts)
• Event Pattern: Event rules to react to a service doing something
• Trigger Lambda functions, send SQS/SNS messages...

• Schema Registry: model event schema
• You can archive events (all/filter) sent to an event bus (indefinitely or set period)
• Ability to replay archived events
  

AWS CloudTrail

• Provides governance, compliance and audit for your AWS Account
• 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

AWS X-Ray

• Debugging in Production, the good old way:
• Test locally
• Add log statements everywhere
• Re-deploy in production
• Log formats differ across applications and log analysis is hard.
• Debugging: one big monolith "easy", distributed services "hard"
• No common views of your entire architecture
• Solution is X-Ray

AWS X-Ray advantages

• Troubleshooting performance (bottlenecks)
• Understand dependencies in a microservice architecture
• Pinpoint service issues
• Review request behaviour
• Find errors and exceptions
• Are we meeting time SLA?
• Where I am throttled?
• Identify users that are impacted

Amazon CodeGuru (decomissioned)

• An ML-powered service for automated code reviews and application performance recommendations
• Provides two functionalities
• CodeGuru Reviewer: automated code reviews for static code analysis (development)
• CodeGuru Profiler: visibility/recommendations about application performance during runtime (production)

Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer

• Identify critical issues, security vulnerabilities, and hard to find bugs
• Example: common coding best practices, resource leaks, security detection, input validation
• Uses Machine Learning and automated reasoning
• Hard-learned lessons across millions of code reviews on 1000s of open-source and Amazon repositories
• Supports Java and Python
• Integrates with GitHub, Bitbucket and AWS CodeCommit

Amazon CodeGuru Profiler

• Helps understand the runtime behaviour 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

AWS Service Health Dashboard - Service History

• Shows all regions, all services health
• Shows historical information for each day
• Has an RSS feed you can subscribe to 
• Previously called AWS Service Health Dashboard

AWS Account Heatlh Dashboard - Your Account

• Previously called AWS Personal Health Dashboard (PHD)
• AWS Account 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, Account 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.
• Can aggregate data from an entire AWS Organization
• Global Service
• Show how AWS outages directly impact you and your AWS resources
• Alert, remediation, proactive, scheduled activities

Monitoring Summary

• CloudWatch
• 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  rule on a schedule
• CloudTrail: audit API calls made within your AWS Account
• CloudTrail insights: automated analysis of your CloudTrail Events
• X-Ray: trace requests made through your distributed applications
• AWS Health Dashboard: status of all AWS services across all regions
• AWS Account Health Dashboard: AWS events that impact your infrastructure
• Amazon CodeGuru: automated code reviews and application performance recommandations