Book Image

Infrastructure Monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch

By : Ewere Diagboya
Book Image

Infrastructure Monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch

By: Ewere Diagboya

Overview of this book

CloudWatch is Amazon’s monitoring and observability service, designed to help those in the IT industry who are interested in optimizing resource utilization, visualizing operational health, and eventually increasing infrastructure performance. This book helps IT administrators, DevOps engineers, network engineers, and solutions architects to make optimum use of this cloud service for effective infrastructure productivity. You’ll start with a brief introduction to monitoring and Amazon CloudWatch and its core functionalities. Next, you’ll get to grips with CloudWatch features and their usability. Once the book has helped you develop your foundational knowledge of CloudWatch, you’ll be able to build your practical skills in monitoring and alerting various Amazon Web Services, such as EC2, EBS, RDS, ECS, EKS, DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, and ELB, with the help of real-world use cases. As you progress, you'll also learn how to use CloudWatch to detect anomalous behavior, set alarms, visualize logs and metrics, define automated actions, and rapidly troubleshoot issues. Finally, the book will take you through monitoring AWS billing and costs. By the end of this book, you'll be capable of making decisions that enhance your infrastructure performance and maintain it at its peak.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to Monitoring and Amazon CloudWatch
5
Section 2: AWS Services and Amazon CloudWatch

Collecting custom metrics on EC2

In Chapter 3, CloudWatch Logs, Metrics, and Dashboard (under the Life cycle of a log section), we talked about how to collect logs from an EC2 instance and send those logs to the CloudWatch Logs console. But the tool we used in that example is the former log collection tool from CloudWatch – the CloudWatch agent. CloudWatch has a new agent called the unified CloudWatch agent. This new agent is designed to be able to collect both logs and metrics from an EC2 instance, unlike the old setup that had two different agents to collect logs and metrics, respectively. It has the ability to collect system-level EC2 metrics (CPU, disk, memory, network), system-level metrics for on-premises servers, and it is also supported on a wide range of Linux distributions (such as Amazon Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, CentOS, and Kali Linux) and on Windows servers. It is also able to collect logs from a particular file, and can be configured to point to...