Monitoring and Analytics

Question 1

Amazon CloudWatch

Answer 1

Amazon CloudWatch is a web service that enables you to monitor and manage various metrics and configure alarm actions based on data from those metrics.

CloudWatch uses metrics to represent the data points for your resources. AWS services send metrics to CloudWatch. CloudWatch then uses these metrics to create graphs automatically that show how performance has changed over time.

Question 2

CloudWatch alarms

Answer 2

With CloudWatch, you can create alarms that automatically perform actions if the value of your metric has gone above or below a predefined threshold.

Question 3

CloudWatch dashboard

Answer 3

The CloudWatch dashboard feature enables you to access all the metrics for your resources from a single location. For example, you can use a CloudWatch dashboard to monitor the CPU utilization of an Amazon EC2 instance, the total number of requests made to an Amazon S3 bucket, and more. You can even customize separate dashboards for different business purposes, applications, or resources.

Question 4

AWS CloudTrail

Answer 4

records API calls for your account. The recorded information includes the identity of the API caller, the time of the API call, the source IP address of the API caller, and more. You can think of CloudTrail as a “trail” of breadcrumbs (or a log of actions) that someone has left behind them.

Question 5

CloudTrail Insights

Answer 5

Within CloudTrail, you can also enable CloudTrail Insights. This optional feature allows CloudTrail to automatically detect unusual API activities in your AWS account.

For example, CloudTrail Insights might detect that a higher number of Amazon EC2 instances than usual have recently launched in your account. You can then review the full event details to determine which actions you need to take next

Question 6

AWS Trusted Advisor

Answer 6

AWS Trusted Advisor is a web service that inspects your AWS environment and provides real-time recommendations in accordance with AWS best practices.

Trusted Advisor compares its findings to AWS best practices in five categories: cost optimization, performance, security, fault tolerance, and service limits. For the checks in each category, Trusted Advisor offers a list of recommended actions and additional resources to learn more about AWS best practices.