Chapter 1: Introduction to Monitoring

Monitoring is a broad topic that covers different human endeavors. Ignorance of monitoring ideals and concepts can adversely affect how to handle and manage engineering and computer systems effectively. Systems are usually not 100% efficient, and there are times they break down or do not work optimally as intended. The only way to understand and predict a breakdown is by monitoring the system. When a system is monitored, its pattern of behavior can be better understood, and this can help to predict a failure before it eventually happens. A proper maintenance process based on what has been monitored can be used to minimize failure of the system.

To help start the journey into monitoring, we will begin with understanding what monitoring is and the building blocks of every monitoring setup and infrastructure. We will explore the techniques used to monitor any infrastructure and for which scenario both of them are designed, and the relationship that exists between different monitoring components. Then, I will explain the importance of monitoring using real-life scenarios to help to emphasize and better your understanding of each importance mentioned. To crown it all, I will explain how the AWS Well-Architected framework portrays monitoring as a very important aspect of your AWS workload, using the principles of the pillar to galvanize what we have already talked about in terms of importance and how it makes the architecture of any Cloud workload complete. The purpose of this chapter is to help you understand what monitoring is, provide a little historical background of monitoring, explain the different ways software applications can be monitored, and shed light on the importance of monitoring and software applications.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following topics:

• Introducing monitoring
• Discovering the types of monitoring
• Understanding the components of monitoring
• Getting to know Amazon CloudWatch
• Introducing the relationship between Amazon CloudWatch and Well-Architected