Monitoring, Logging, & Auditing

Question 1

What is Amazon CloudWatch?

Amazon CloudWatch Overview

Answer 1

Used for performance monitoring, alarms, log collection & automated actions

Question 2

What are Use Cases/Benifits of Amazon CloudWatch?

Amazon CloudWatch Overview

Answer 2

• Collect performance metrics from AWS & on-premises systems
• Automate responses to operation changes
• Improve operational performance & resource optimization
• Derive actionable insights from logs
• Get operational visibility & insight

Question 3

What are Amazon CloudWatch Core Features?

Amazon CloudWatch Overview

Answer 3

• CloudWatch Metrics: services send time-ordered data to it
• CloudWatch Alarms: monitor metrics & initiate actions
• CloudWatch Logs: centralized collection of zyztem & application logs
• CloudWatch Events: stream of system events describing changes to AWS resources & can trigger actions

Question 4

What are Amazon CloudWatch Metrics?

Amazon CloudWatch Overview

Answer 4

• Metrics sent to it for many AWS services
• EC2 metrics sent every 5 minutes by default (free)
• Detailed EC2 monitoring sends every 1 minute (chargeable)
• Unified CloudWatch Agent sends system-level metrics for EC2 & on-premises servers
• System-level metrics include memory & disk usage

Question 5

What are Amazon CloudWatch Custom Metrics?

Amazon CloudWatch Overview

Answer 5

• Can publish custom metrics using CLI or API
• Custom metrics are following resolutions:
  
  • Standard Resolution - data having one-minute granularity
  • High Resolution - data at one-second granularity
• Standard resolution by default

Question 6

What are Amazon CloudWatch Alarms types?

Amazon CloudWatch Overview

Answer 6

• Metric Alarm - performs one/more actions based on single metric
• Composite Alarm - uses rule expression & takes into account multiple alarms

Question 7

What are Metric Alarm states?

Amazon CloudWatch Overview

Answer 7

• OK - w/in threshold
• ALARM - outside threshold
• INSUFFICIENT_DATA - not enough data

Question 8

What are Amazon CloudWatch Logs?

Amazon CloudWatch Logs

Answer 8

• Gather application & system logs in CloudWatch
• Defined expiration policies & KMS encryption

Question 9

Where dow Amazon CloudWatch Logs send to?

Amazon CloudWatch Logs

Answer 9

• Amazon S3 (export)
• Kinesis Data Streams
• Kinesis Data Firehose

Unified CloudWatch Agent - installed on EC2 & on-premises servers

Question 10

What are other features of CloudWatch Logs?

Answer 10

• AWS Lambda: requires permissions to Logs
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service: Real-Time log processing w/ subscription logs

Question 11

Unified CloudWatch Agent

Question 12

What is Unified CloudWatch Agent?

Unified CloudWatch Agent

Answer 12

• Collect internal system-level metrics from EC2 instances across operating systems
• Collect system-level metrics from on-premises servers
• Retrieve custom metrics from applications/services using StatsD & collectd protocols
• Collect logs from EC2 instances & on-premises servers (Windows/Linux)

Question 13

What are features of Unified CloudWatch Agent?

Unified CloudWatch Agent

Answer 13

• Must be installed on server
• Can be installed on:
  
  • Amazon EC2 instance
  • On-premises servers
  • Linux, Windows Server, or MacOS

Question 14

What is AWS CloudTrail?

AWS CloudTrail

Answer 14

Logs API Activity for auditing

Question 15

What are features of AWS CloudTrail?

AWS CloudTrail

Answer 15

• Default: management events logged & retained for 90 days
• CloudTrail Trail logs any events to S3 for indefinite retention
• Can be w/in Region or All Regions
• CloudWatch Events can be triggered based on API calls in CloudTrail
• Events can be streamed to CloudWatch Logs

Question 16

What are CloudTrail Types of Events?

AWS CloudTrail

Answer 16

• Management Events - provide info a/b management operations performed on AWS account
• Data Events - provide info a/b resource operations performed on/in resource
• Insights Events - identify & respond to unusual activity associated w/ Write API calls by continuously analyzing CloudTrail management events

Question 17

What is AWS X-Ray?

Metric Analysis and Tracing

Answer 17

• Visualize application components
• Identify performance bottlenecks
• Troubleshoot requests that made errors

Also:
- AWS services send trace data to X-Ray & it processes data to generate service map & searchable trace summaries

Question 18

What are characteristics of AWS X-Ray?

Metric Analysis and Tracing

Answer 18

• Can be used w/ applications running on:
  
  • EC2
  • ECS
  • Lambda
  • Elastic Beanstalk
• Must integregate its SDK w/ application & install its agent
• Agent is software application that gathers raw segment data & relays it to its service
• SDK captures metadata for requests made to MySQL & PostgreSQL databases & DynamoDB
• Captures metadata for requests made to SQS & SNS

Question 19

What is Prometheus

Amazon Managed Service

Metric Analysis and Tracing

Answer 19

Open-source monitoring system & time series database

Question 20

What are features of Prometheus?

Amazon Managed Service

Metric Analysis and Tracing

Answer 20

• Use its open-source query language (PromQL) to monitor & alert performance of containerized workloads
• Automatically scales following of operation metrics as workloads grow/shrink:
  
  • Ingestion
  • Storage
  • Alerting
  • Querying
• Integrated these for OpenTelemetry
  
  • Amazon EKS
  • Amazon ECS
  • AWS Distro

Question 21

What is Grafana?

Amazon Managed Service

Metric Analysis and Tracing

Answer 21

Open-source analytics & monitoring solution for databases

Question 22

What are features of Grafana?

Amazon Managed Service

Metric Analysis and Tracing

Answer 22

• Highly scalably, highly available, & fully managed service
• Provides interactive data visualization for your monitoring & operational data
• Lets you visualize, analyze, & alarm on your metrics, logs, & traces collected from multiple data sources
• Integrates w/ AWS SSO & SAML