Section - Cloudwatch

Question 1

AWS CloudWatch?

Answer 1

• Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service to minitor the health and performance of your AWS resources
• Including applications that you run on AWS, and in your own datacenter.
• There are two types of Metrics:
  
  • Default
    
    • These matrics are provided out of the box and do not require any additional work on your part
    • List of Default:
      
      • CPU
      • Network Throughput
  • Custom
    
    • These metrics will need to be provided by using the CloudWatch agent installed in the host.
    • List of Custom:
      
      • EC2 Memory utilization
      • EBS storage capacity
• What CloudWatch Monitor:
  
  • Compute
    
    • EC2 Instances
    • Auto Scalling groups
    • Elastic load balancers
    • Route53 health checks
    • Lambda
  • Storage and Content Delivery
    
    • EBS volumes
    • Storage Gateway
    • CloudFront
  • Database & Analytics
    
    • DynamoDB tables
    • ElastiCache nodes
    • RDS instances
    • Redshift
    • Elastic map reduce
  • Other
    
    • SNS topics
    • SQS queues
    • API Gateway
    • API Gateway
    • Estimated AWS charges

Question 2

What is the CloudWatch Agent?

Answer 2

• Define your own metrics.
• CloudWatch Logs allows you to monitor operating system and application logs.

Question 3

CloudWatch Exam Tips ?

Answer 3

• Default EC2 host-level metrics: CPU, Network, Disk, and status check.
• Use the CloudWatch agent for operating system-level metrics like memory usage, processes, and CPU idel time.
• Monitor and store your logs to help you better understand your systems and appplications.
• You can create an alarm to monitor any Amazon CloudWatch metric in your account, generate an alert or take some action.

Question 4

What is CloudTrail?

Answer 4

• AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account.
• With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure.
• CloudTrail provides event history of your AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services.
• This event history simplifies security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting. In addition, you can use CloudTrail to detect unusual activity in your AWS accounts.
• These capabilities help simplify operational analysis and troubleshooting.

Question 5

What is CloudWatch logs(Not real time monitoring)?

Answer 5

• CloudWatch Logs is a tool that allows you to monitor, store and access log files from variety of different sources.
• It gives you the ability to query your logs to look for pontential issues or data that is relevantr to you.
• 3 CloudWatch Logs Terms:
  
  • Log Event
    
    • This is the record of what happened. it contains a timestamp and data.
  • Log Stream
    
    • A collection of log events from the same source create a log stream. Think of one continuous set of logs from a single instance.
  • Log Group
    
    • This is a collection of log streams. For example, you’d group all your Apache Web Server logs accross hosts together.
• CloudWatch Logs features:
  
  • Filter patterns: you can look for specific terms in your logs. think 400 erros in your web server logs.
  • CloudWatch Logs Insights: This allows you to query all your logs using a SQL-Like interactive solution.