Cloud Monitoring

Question 1

Amazon CloudWatch

Answer 1

• • CloudWatch provides metrics for every services in AWS
• Metric is a variable to monitor (CPUUtilization, NetworkIn…)
• 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 much you’ve been using a service API
* Custom metrics: push your own metrics

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. INSUFFICIENTDATA, ALARM

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

Question 2

Amazon EventBridge
(formerly CloudWatch Events)

Answer 2

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Question 3

AWS CloudTrail

Answer 3

• Provides governance, compliance and audit for your AWS Account
• CloudTrail is enabled by default!
• Audit API calls made within your AWS account
• Get a 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!
• CloudTrail Insights: automated analysis of your CloudTrail Events

Question 4

AWS X-Ray

Answer 4

• Visual analysis of our applications
• 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 5

Amazon CodeGuru

Answer 5

• A 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 behavior 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

Question 6

AWS Health Dashboard - Service History

Answer 6

• 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

Question 7

AWS Account Health Dashboard
(Your Account)

Answer 7

• 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
• Shows how AWS outages directly impact you & your AWS resources
• Alert, remediation, proactive, scheduled activities