Monitoring, Logging, and Notification Services

Question 1

What is CloudWatch?

Answer 1

CloudWatch monitors your AWS resources, and the applications you run in AWS, in real time.

Question 2

What is CloudWatch used for?

Answer 2

1. To collect and track metrics
2. Use CloudWatch alarms to send notifications or automatically make changes to your monitored AWS resources, based on rules that you define.

Question 3

What are the benefits of using CloudWatch?

Answer 3

1. Monitor metrics for almost all of your AWS resources
2. Create and monitor custom metrics
3. Create custom dashboards for easy viewing of metrics
4. Monitor and store logs
5. Set alarms and events (and trigger actions based on them)

Question 4

What is CloudTrail?

Answer 4

Service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account.

Question 5

What does CloudTrail do?

Answer 5

Provides event history of your AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS management console, SDK’s, command line tools, and other AWS services.

Question 6

What is SNS?

Answer 6

Simple Notification Service: Web service that coordinates and manages the delivery or sending of messages to subscribing endpoints or clients.

Question 7

What are the two client types (and what are they) in SNS?

Answer 7

1. Publishers (AKA producers): Communicate asynchronously with subscribers by producing and sending a message to a topic, which is a logical access point and communication channel.
2. Subscribers (AKA Consumers): i.e. web servers, email addresses, Lambda functions, etc. consume or receive the message or notification over one of the supported protocols when they are subscribed to the topic.

Question 8

What is a Topic?

Answer 8

How you label and group different endpoints that you send messages to using SNS

Question 9

What is a Subscription?

Answer 9

The endpoints that a topic sends messages to.

Question 10

What is a Publisher?

Answer 10

The human/alarm/event that gives SNS the message that needs to be sent.

Question 11

What are some of the benefits of SNS?

Answer 11

1. Send automated or manual notifications
2. Send notification to email, mobile (sms), and http endpoints
3. Closely integrated with other AWS services (such as CloudWatch) so that alarms, events, and actions in your AWS infrastructure can trigger notifications.