Cloud Monitoring

Question 1

Amazon CloudWatch

Answer 1

Is a monitoring and observability service built

• 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…

Question 2

CloudWatch Metrics

Answer 2

• CloudWatch provides metrics for every services in AWS
• Metric is a variable to monitor
• Metrics have timestamps
• Can create CloudWatch dashboards of metrics

Question 3

Important CloudWatch Metrics

Answer 3

• EC2 instances: CPU Utilization, Status Checks, Network (not RAM)
• EBS volumes: Disk Read/Writes
• S3 buckets: BucketSizeBytes, NumberOfObjects, AllRequests
• Billing: Total Estimated Charge (only in us-east-1)
• Service Limits: how much you’ve been using a service API
• Custom metrics: push your own metrics

Question 4

CloudWatch Alarms

Answer 4

Alarms are used to trigger notifications for any metric
• Can choose the period on which to evaluate an alarm
• Alarm States: OK. INSUFFICIENT_DATA, ALARM

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

Question 5

CloudWatch Logs (Hybrid)

Answer 5

Enables real-time monitoring of logs
• Adjustable CloudWatch Logs retention

• 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 querie

Question 6

Amazon EventBridge (formerly CloudWatch Events)

Answer 6

Serverless event bus that makes it easier to build event-driven applications at scale using events generated from your applications

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

Question 7

Amazon EventBridge

Answer 7

• 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

Question 8

AWS CloudTrail

Answer 8

Provides governance, compliance and audit for your AWS Account
• Get an history of events / API calls made within your AWS Account
• Can put logs from CloudTrail into CloudWatch Logs or S3
• A trail can be applied to All Regions (default) or a single Region.

Question 9

CloudTrail Events

Answer 9

• Management Events= Provide information about management operations that are performed on resources, like Registering devices and Configuring security.
• Data Events = Provide information about the resource operations performed on or in a resource, like Amazon S3 object-level API activity and AWS Lambda function execution activity.
• CloudTrail Insights Events

Question 10

CloudTrail Insights

Answer 10

Enable CloudTrail Insights to detect unusual activity in your account
• inaccurate resource provisioning
• hitting service limits
• Bursts of AWS IAM actions
• Gaps in periodic maintenance activity

• CloudTrail Insights analyzes normal management events to create a baseline
• And then continuously analyzes write events to detect unusual patterns

Question 11

CloudTrail Events Retention (Days)

Answer 11

• Events are stored for 90 days in CloudTrail
• To keep events beyond this period, log them to S3 and use Athena

Question 12

AWS X-Ray

Answer 12

Helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture.
• Troubleshooting performance (bottlenecks)
• Understand dependencies in a microservice architecture
• Pinpoint service issues • Review request behavior
• Find errors and exceptions
• Are we meeting time SLA? • Where I am throttled?
• Identify users that are impacted

Question 13

Amazon CodeGuru

Answer 13

A Machine Learning powered service for automated code reviews and application performance recommendations

• CodeGuru Reviewer: automated code reviews for static code analysis (development)
• CodeGuru Profiler: visibility/recommendations about application performance during
runtime (production)

Question 14

Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer

Answer 14

Identify critical issues, security vulnerabilities, and hard-to-find bugs

• Integrates with GitHub, Bitbucket, and
AWS CodeCommit

Question 15

Amazon CodeGuru Profiler

Answer 15

Helps understand the runtime behavior of your
application
• Support applications running on AWS or on- premise

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

Question 16

AWS Status - Service Health Dashboard

Answer 16

Shows all regions, all services health

• Shows historical information for each day

Question 17

AWS Personal Health Dashboard

Answer 17

Provides alerts and remediation guidance when AWS is experiencing events that may impact you.

• 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.

Question 18

Monitoring Summary

Answer 18

• 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 a 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
• Service Health Dashboard: status of all AWS services across all regions
• Personal Health Dashboard: AWS events that impact your infrastructure
• Amazon CodeGuru: automated code reviews and application performance recommendation