Monitoring (ACG) Flashcards
What is CloudWatch?
Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for the health and performance of your AWS resources as well as applications on AWS or in your own datacenter.
What can you do with the CloudWatch Agent?
The CloudWatch Agent allows you to define your own metrics.
What can you do with CloudWatch Logs?
CloudWatch Logs allows you to monitor your OS and app logs.
What are the default metrics that all EC2 instances send to CloudWatch?
CPU, network, disk, and status check are sent to CloudWatch and stored indefinitely.
You can retrieve data from any EC2 or ELB instance even after it has been terminated.
By default, what metrics do EC2 instances NOT send to CloudWatch?
By default, EC2 does not send OS-level metrics to CloudWatch. You would need to install a CloudWatch Agent to accomplish this.
What are some OS-level metrics?
Memory usage, processes running, free disk space, CPU idle time, etc.
By default, how often does EC2 send metric data to CloudWatch?
5 min intervals
For an addtl. charge, you can enable detailed monitoring that sends metrics at 1 min intervals.
For custom metrics, the default is also 1 min intervals and you can configure high resolution metrics that are sent at 1 sec intervals.
What is CloudTrail?
Records all API calls for your AWS account including user activity and creation/deletion/modification of AWS resources.
Provides an audit log user activity in your AWS account.
What is a CloudWatch Namespace?
A namespace is a container for CloudWatch Metrics, e.g., EC2 uses the AWS/EC2 namespace.
What is a CloudWatch Dimension?
A dimension is like a filter, e.g. use the InstanceId dimension to search for metrics for a specific EC2 instance.
What are CloudWatch Dashboards?
A dashboard is like a custom homepage that you can display important metrics to you in one place.
What are CloudWatch Actions?
The CloudWatch API supports a long list of different actions to publish, monitor, and alert on a variety of metrics.
These are particularly powerful when creating custom metrics for monitoring and alerting for your app.
What are the most commonly used CloudWatch Actions?
PutMetricData
PutMetricAlarm
What API call publishes metric data points to CloudWatch?
PutMetricData
You can define the name of the metric, namespace, value, and a timestamp.
What API call creates an alarm associated with a CloudWatch metric to alert you if a threshold has been reached?
PutMetricAlarm
