Cloudwatch

Understanding AWS Monitoring and Logging Services

Introduction

In this blog post, we’ll explore various AWS monitoring and logging services such as CloudWatch, CloudTrail, X-Ray, and Amazon EventBridge. These services are essential for maintaining the health, performance, and security of your AWS resources and applications.

CloudWatch

Custom Metrics

• Custom metrics allow you to define your own metrics and monitor them using CloudWatch.
• High-resolution custom metrics offer monitoring at intervals as short as 1 second, but this is a paid offering and is disabled by default.
• CloudWatch Alarms can be set up to trigger actions based on metric thresholds, such as exceeding disk space usage.

Logs Monitoring

• CloudWatch Logs enable you to collect, monitor, and analyze log data from various sources.
• You can create metric filters to extract data from log events
• Log subscriptions can send log data in real-time to services like Kinesis Data Streams for further processing.

CloudWatch Synthetics

• CloudWatch Synthetics provides tools for monitoring APIs, URLs, and websites with configurable scripts.
• Canary blueprints offer predefined monitoring scenarios like heartbeat monitoring and API checks.

Amazon EventBridge

• EventBridge allows you to build event-driven architectures by routing events from various sources to targets for processing.
• Event buses and rules define how events are processed, and multi-account aggregation enables centralized event management.

AWS X-Ray

• X-Ray provides distributed tracing for understanding the performance and behavior of your applications.
• It leverages tracing to follow requests end-to-end and provides insights into latency and errors.
• X-Ray SDK and Daemon enable instrumentation of applications and collection of trace data.

AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry

• This offering provides a unified set of APIs, libraries, agents, and collector services for collecting telemetry data from applications.
• It supports auto-instrumentation agents to collect traces without code changes and integrates with various AWS services.

CloudTrail

• CloudTrail offers governance, compliance, and audit trail capabilities by recording API calls and events within your AWS account.
• Management events track operations performed on AWS resources, while data events monitor data-related activities.
• CloudTrail Insights help detect unusual patterns in AWS activity for security and compliance purposes.

Conclusion

AWS provides a comprehensive suite of monitoring and logging services to help you monitor the health, performance, and security of your AWS environment. By leveraging services like CloudWatch, CloudTrail, X-Ray, and EventBridge, you can gain insights into your applications, detect issues, and ensure compliance with security policies.