Moving to the cloud requires having the right tools for observability and monitoring. Legacy on-premises monitoring solutions can often not monitor cloud environments like AWS effectively. AWS CloudWatch is the cloud-native monitoring tool found in Amazon Web Services, allowing businesses to effectively create customized monitoring for their cloud environment.
Table of Contents
What is AWS CloudWatch?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) CloudWatch is a comprehensive monitoring and observability service. It’s designed to provide system-wide visibility into your AWS resources and applications. With CloudWatch, you can collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, set alarms, and automatically react to changes in your AWS resources.
AWS CloudWatch provides monitoring and visibility to resources and applications
CloudWatch is versatile, allowing you to monitor not just AWS resources, but also on-premises servers. You can track various metrics, such as CPU usage, disk reads/writes, and network traffic.
The ability to create your custom metrics or leverage built-in metrics makes AWS CloudWatch an essential tool for maintaining the operational health of your systems. This level of insight is crucial for detecting anomalies, setting effective alarms, and automatically adjusting resources based on demand, thereby helping you optimize your applications and save money.
You can also take advantage of the capability that CloudWatch alarms send notifications. It allows you to setup thresholds and trigger notifications based on these thresholds.
Custom Metrics and Built-in Metrics: Monitoring Made Efficient
CloudWatch goes beyond basic monitoring by allowing you to define and track custom metrics and offering a suite of built-in metrics. The benefit? More granular insights into application performance and data points allow you to understand your infrastructure’s operational health better. Note the following features.
Proactive Approach Towards Resource Utilization
CloudWatch Alarms bring an additional layer of sophistication to your monitoring efforts. These alarms can be set to change states based on specified metrics automatically. Consequently, CloudWatch alarms can send notifications or launch additional instances when a threshold is crossed. The result? A proactive approach to managing increased load.
Performance monitoring overview in AWS CloudWatch
Gain System-Wide Visibility
Tracking metrics aims to gain system-wide visibility into your AWS resources. Whether you’re concerned about under-utilized instances or high CPU usage, CloudWatch paints a holistic picture of your resource utilization. AWS CLI cloudwatch allows gaining quick and easy access to these metrics and configuring these programmatically.
Saving Money and Improving Performance
An often overlooked advantage of AWS CloudWatch is its capacity to save money. You can identify and stop under-used instances by tracking metrics, thereby reducing unnecessary costs. Similarly, launching additional instances when an increased load helps maintain application performance, ensuring you meet your service level agreements.
What is AWS CLI?
The AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) is a unified tool that allows you to manage and control AWS services from the command line. It provides direct access to AWS services’ public APIs and simplifies scripting these commands.
Download and install the AWS CLI tools from here. Once you have the AWS CLI installed, your scripts can directly call AWS CLI commands to perform AWS tasks as if you were using the console. AWS CLI supports a wide range of AWS services and is also available for various platforms including Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Run the aws cloudwatch command after installing the AWS CLI tools
With AWS CLI, you can automate tedious and repetitive tasks, making resource management more efficient. In the context of AWS CloudWatch, AWS CLI facilitates actions such as publishing your own custom metrics, setting alarms, and automating resource adjustments based on the data points collected.
Using AWS CLI Commands for Custom Metrics
Creating your own custom metrics is simplified by AWS CLI commands. You can tailor these metrics to capture precise data points, offering a deeper understanding of your system. This way, you’re not just tracking CPU usage or disk reads, but you can create and track metrics crucial to your specific use case.
Examples of AWS CLI commands with CloudWatch
Note the following examples of using AWS CLI commands with CloudWatch.
- Publishing custom metrics
You can publish your own custom metrics to CloudWatch using the ‘put-metric-data’ command:aws cloudwatch put-metric-data --metric-name MyMetrics --namespace MyNamespace --value 123
- Creating a CloudWatch alarm
You can create an alarm that sends an Amazon SNS message when the alarm changes state:aws cloudwatch put-metric-alarm --alarm-name cpu-mon --alarm-description "Alarm when CPU exceeds 70 percent" --metric-name CPUUtilization --namespace AWS/EC2 --statistic Average --period 300 --threshold 70 --comparison-operator GreaterThanThreshold --dimensions Name=InstanceId,Value=i-123abc45d --evaluation-periods 2 --alarm-actions arn:aws:sns:us-west-1:111122223333:MyTopic --unit Percent
- Listing all CloudWatch alarms
You can list all your current alarms using the ‘describe-alarms’ command:aws cloudwatch describe-alarms
- Getting statistics for a metric
You can use the’ get-metric-statistics’ command to retrieve the statistics for a specified metric.aws cloudwatch get-metric-statistics --namespace AWS/EC2 --metric-name CPUUtilization --dimensions Name=InstanceId,Value=i-123abc45d --start-time 2023-07-03T12:00:00 --end-time 2023-07-04T12:00:00 --period 3600 --statistics Average --unit Percent
Please note that these are general examples and must be adjusted according to your specific requirements and AWS setup, accounts, namespaces, etc.
Points to note
1. How does AWS CLI CloudWatch contribute to enhanced system-wide visibility?
AWS CLI CloudWatch monitors custom and built-in metrics across all your resources. This thorough monitoring provides detailed insights into resource performance and usage, enabling proactive management and optimization of your system.
2. In what ways does CloudWatch facilitate cost savings?
CloudWatch assists in identifying under-utilized instances, allowing you to stop them and save on costs. Also, through its alarm feature, CloudWatch can automatically launch additional instances to manage increased load, ensuring efficient resource utilization and avoiding potential revenue loss due to degraded application performance.
3. Does AWS CLI CloudWatch offer automation in managing resource allocations?
Yes, CloudWatch alarms enable automated resource management. These alarms can launch or stop instances automatically when triggered by specific metric thresholds. This capability is critical for maintaining consistent application performance and overall system health.
Wrapping up
By combining the power of AWS CLI with CloudWatch alarms, you can monitor and react to changes in your environment. Based on your chosen metrics, the alarms can send notifications or even automatically adjust resources, empowering you to maintain system stability. You can also notify based on metrics and thresholds you configure, making it a handy tool for monitoring AWS performance and cost metrics.
