Book Image

AWS Observability Handbook

By : Phani Kumar Lingamallu, Fabio Braga de Oliveira
Book Image

AWS Observability Handbook

By: Phani Kumar Lingamallu, Fabio Braga de Oliveira

Overview of this book

As modern application architecture grows increasingly complex, identifying potential points of failure and measuring end user satisfaction, in addition to monitoring application availability, is key. This book helps you explore AWS observability tools that provide end-to-end visibility, enabling quick identification of performance bottlenecks in distributed applications. You’ll gain a holistic view of monitoring and observability on AWS, starting from observability basics using Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray to advanced ML-powered tools such as AWS DevOps Guru. As you progress, you'll learn about AWS-managed open source services such as AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) and AWS managed Prometheus, Grafana, and the ELK Stack. You’ll implement observability in EC2 instances, containers, Kubernetes, and serverless apps and grasp UX monitoring. With a fair mix of concepts and examples, this book helps you gain hands-on experience in implementing end-to-end AWS observability in your applications and navigating and troubleshooting performance issues with the help of use cases. You'll also learn best practices and guidelines, such as how observability relates to the Well-Architected Framework. By the end of this AWS book, you’ll be able to implement observability and monitoring in your apps using AWS’ native and managed open source tools in real-world scenarios.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started with Observability on AWS
6
Part 2: Automated and Machine Learning-Powered Observability on AWS
11
Part 3: Open Source Managed Services on AWS
15
Part 4: Scaled Observability and Beyond

Deployment and configuration of the CloudWatch agent in an EC2 instance

When you launch an EC2 instance, whether Linux or Windows, CloudWatch will provide metrics related to the instance, such as CPU, network, and disk metrics, by default. The automated dashboard in Figure 3.2 provides the default AWS vended metrics provided by CloudWatch as part of the EC2 instance built with no additional configuration.

You can view the automatic dashboard generated by AWS CloudWatch by navigating to CloudWatch –> Dashboard –> Automatic Dashboard –> EC2. This should display the default AWS vended metrics provided by CloudWatch, as seen in the following screenshot:

Figure 3.2 – Automated dashboard generated by CloudWatch for default AWS vended EC2 metrics

Building upon the default vended metrics provided by AWS, there are certain metrics that are only visible to the guest operating system, such as memory metrics and page file utilization...