What does monitoring consist of?
- observing systems
- collecting metrics
- evaluating metrics over time
- using metrics to make decisions or take actions
What is Amazon CloudWatch?
A tool for monitoring infrastructure and applications in real time.
What is CloudWatch alarm?
Alert is generated and action is triggered when a variable reaches certain threshold.
Alarms are integrated with SNS, which allows for e.g. sending SMS to someone.
What is CloudWatch Dashboard?
integrates metrics on a screen in near real time with auto refresh
Benefits of CloudWatch
- access all metrics from a central location
- gain visibility across applications, infrastructure, services
- gain instights across distributed stack
- reduce MTTR (mean time to resolution)
- drive insights to optimize applications and perational resources (e.g. aggregate usage across instances)
What is AWS CloudTrail?
Comprehensive API auditing tool. Every request made to AWS gets logged in the CloudTrail engine: who, what, when, what was the IP, what was the response, what is the new state, was the request denied, etc.
After what time events are visible in CloudTrail?
15 mintues
What is CloudTrail Insights?
A paid optional feature which detects unusual API activities in an account.
What is AWS Trusted Advisor?
A web service which inspects an AWS environment and provides real-time recommendations in accordance with AWS best practices.
Five pillars of AWS Trusted Advisor
- cost optimization (e.g. underused instances)
- performance
- security (e.g. no MFA)
- fault-tolerance (e.g. volumes not backed up)
- service limits
What does AWS Trusted Advisor do?
Runs a series of checks related to each pillar. Displays compiled and categorized items to look into in the AWS Console. It can send emails.
Is AWS Trusted Advisor paid?
Some checks are free, other depend on the support plan bought.
