Using Amazon CloudWatch to monitor our application
In the previous sections, we briefly looked at how we can use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor and trigger alarms for use in autoscaling. In this section, we will look at how CloudWatch is accessed from the AWS console, and how our actions from the previous sections appear in the AWS console.
CloudWatch in the AWS console
CloudWatch is also now available in the AWS console in its detailed form.
To access CloudWatch, click on the CloudWatch tab in the AWS console:
The first thing you may notice is that there are already two alarms specified, those we specified for our autoscaling web group (WebLowCLUAlarm and WebHighCPUAlarm). One thing I didn't cover in the previous section was that once an autoscaling group has been created along with the relevant policies, these can be managed from within the AWS console.
To demonstrate this, let's create a new alarm that sends an SNS alert when the AppAutoScaleGroup falls below 10 percent for more than 120 seconds...