Monitoring and Analytics

Question 1

Describe CloudWatch

Answer 1

1) Web service that enables to monitor and manage various metrics and configure alarm actions based on data from those metrics
2) Uses metrics to represent the data points for the resources
3) AWS services send metrics to CloudWatch
4) CloudWatch then uses these metrics to create graphs automatically that show how performance has changed over time
5) Can create alarms that automatically perform actions if the value of the metric has gone above or below a predefined threshold
6) Has a dashboard feature which enables to access all the metrics for the resources rom a single location
EXAMPLE: Use a dashboard to monitor the CPU utilization of an Amazon EC2 instance, the total number of requests made to an Amazon S3 bucket

Question 2

Describe AWS CloudTrail

Answer 2

1) Records API calls from the account
2) The recorded information includes:
* Identity of the API caller
* Time of the API call
* Source of the API caller
3) Trail of breadcrumbs or log of actions that someone has left behind
4) View a complete history of user activity and API calls for the applications and resources
5) Events are typically updated within 15 minutes after an API call
6) Able to filter events based on:
* Time and date an API call occurred
* User who requested the action
* Type of resource that was involved in the API call
7) Can enable CloudTrail Insights which is an optional feature that allows CloudTrail to automatically detect unusual API activities…like higher number of Amazon EC2 instances than unusual have recently launched in the account

Question 3

Describe AWS Trusted Advisor

Answer 3

1) Web service that inspects your AWS environment and provides real-time recommendations in accordance with AWS best practices
2) Compares its findings to AWS best practices in 5 categories:
* Cost optimization
* Performance
* Security
* Fault Tolerance
* Service limits
3) Can be used to assist while creating new workflows/developing new applications or while making ongoing improvements to existing applications/resources
4) Dashboard shows:
* Number of items with no problems detected
* Recommended investigations and recommended actions for the categories
* Displays an icon for each category
- Green check indicates the number of items for which it detected no problems
- Orange triangle represents the number of recommended investigations
- The red circle represents the number of recommended actions