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

Introducing CloudWatch Logs

We previously defined logs in Chapter 1, Introduction to Monitoring, and this time we are going to streamline our understanding of logs in the context of CloudWatch. But for the purpose of reminding us, let's go back to what logs are. Logs are a series of events captured in a text format. The text format could be unstructured or semi-structured data formats.

Important Note

Unstructured data is a kind of data that does not have a specific defined model with which the data is stored. It does not conform to a specific consistent pattern. Unstructured data usually comes with a few data types, such as string, number, or date and time. Most web server logs are unstructured data.

Semi-structured data is a form of storing data that is not fully structured data; it does not conform to the relational (table) method of storing data in rows and columns. Instead, it uses its own unique pairs and grouping of data in a unique way to help the data look a...