Exploring Auditing, Monitoring, and Logging Services

Question 1

What is CloudWatch?

Answer 1

Is a collection of services that help you monitor and observe your cloud resources. Helps you observe your cloud resources and provides actionable insights.

Alarms – helps you set high resolution alarms like a billing alarms

Logs – monitor application logs

Metrics – helps you visualize time series data

Events – allows you to take automated action and trouble shoot issues

Question 2

What are some real world use cases for CloudWatch?

Answer 2

You can use CloudWatch to monitor your EC2 instances and notify you when certain events occur such as an EC2 instance goes into stopped state or usage does above a certain utilization.

Question 3

What is CloudTrial?

Answer 3

Tracks user activity and API calls within your account

Log and retain account activity

Identify which user made changes

Track activity through the concole, SDKs and CLI

Detect unusual activity in your account

Question 4

What can you track with CloudTrial?

Answer 4

username

event time and name

IP address

access key

Region

error code

Question 5

What is Amazon WorkSpaces?

Answer 5

Allows you to host virtual desktops in the cloud (so people can work remotely)

Question 6

What is Amazon Connect?

Answer 6

Is a cloud contact center service

Provides customer service functionality

Improves productivity of help desk agents (set up 800 numbers and help desks in the cloud)

Question 7

Your company would like to begin using Auto Scaling to add servers when CPU utilization reaches a certain threshold (e.g., 70%). Which service can you use to trigger actions when CPU utilization crosses the threshold?

Answer 7

CloudWatch Alarms

A CloudWatch alarm can be set up to monitor CPU utilization and trigger further action. Further action could be an Auto Scaling group adding another EC2 instance and/or using SNS to notify team members of the occurrence.