As the popularity of cloud computing increases, the relevance of platforms like AWS increases as well. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the most popular cloud platforms for leveraging business processes in organizations across the globe. Providing powerful services via an advanced public cloud, AWS helps businesses integrate their existing workflows and enhance their overall functionality.
While moving to the cloud provides you with better flexibility, scalability, and storage space, it is important to keep a check on your cloud platform to ensure its smooth functioning. This is what makes AWS monitoring useful.
What Is AWS Monitoring?
AWS monitoring refers to a set of processes that revolve around assessing, observing, and tracking the quality and functioning of AWS resources over time. It allows users to observe and analyze the dynamic environments on the public cloud of AWS in real-time.
AWS monitoring involves implementing a set of different tools and services that keep track of the AWS processes on an ongoing basis. This helps you ensure that your assets are secure and functional at all times. In the age of digitization, you cannot afford to take chances when it comes to compromising the performance of your system and the security of your data. AWS monitoring prevents you from taking risks and ensuring proper use of the cloud platform.
Why Is AWS Monitoring Necessary?
AWS monitoring deals with a range of different processes such as tracking, logging, and querying multiple metrics. Some of these processes may take time and can get a little complicated for non-technical users. Moreover, choosing the right tools can be a challenging task as it requires getting a list of AWS monitoring tools and choosing an alternative that best suits your business needs.
However, AWS monitoring is still worthwhile and here are the reasons why you shouldn’t be avoiding it:
- AWS monitoring allows you to boost your AWS visibility, helping you monitor all your AWS resources from a centralized platform. This eliminates data silos and provides you with greater control over your assets.
- It makes it easy to identify and remediate anomalies regarding your system’s security, performance, and functionality.
- AWS monitoring helps you identify abnormal behaviors within your system in advance, allowing you to prevent service disruptions. This leads to businesses resolving issues before customers notice them and raising complaints.
- It helps users in managing their AWS stack effectively without ignoring any components.
- It allows you to collect and lo the right data for providing valuable insights having business value.
- AWS monitoring helps you maintain regulatory compliance even after you have switched to a cloud-based environment for better observability.
- It provides users with valuable insights into the business processes for triggering automated actions to remediate abnormal issues with speed and efficiency.
- AWS monitoring helps you in monitoring hybrid clouds as well as on-premise environments along with the AWS public cloud.
- It allows users to track the impact of scaling their systems and other important engineering decisions made by them on their overall AWS costs to avoid overspending.
Important Metrics To Be Considered For AWS Monitoring
Identifying and focusing on the right AWS metrics allows you to make the most of AWS monitoring. This provides users with a clear sense of direction and helps them make the right decisions.
Here are some of the most important AWS metrics to be considered for seamless AWS monitoring:
Status Check
Status check provides you with the data collected by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) through automated checks. This data offers details information about the issues that may be affecting the performance of your EC2 instances.
Memory Utilization
This metric allows you to measure memory usage across multiple Aws services. Seamless AWS monitoring allows you to determine whether there is a need to scale your memory when its usage is constantly high.
CPU Utilization
CPU utilization refers to the percentage of allocated compute units utilized by the users. Through AWS monitoring, you can detect whether your CPU is a bottleneck to the system’s performance by being over or under-utilized.
Latency
Latency refers to the time gap between a request made by a customer and its response given by a cloud provider. High latency implies that there may be issues with network connectivity, backend servers, or web server dependencies. Issues like these would hamper the performance of your application and lead to an increase in your AWS costs.
Tracking Disk Utilization
Tracking disk utilization helps users check if the disk volume on the node storage capacity is enough for their workloads.
Swap Usage
Swap usage refers to the disk capacity within your system that is dedicated to holding data that needs to be in memory. High swap usage implies potential degradation of your application’s performance as it defeats the purpose of in-memory caching.
Cost Anomaly Detection
AWS cost anomaly detection allows users to monitor all unusual spending to keep a check on overspending.
Best AWS Monitoring Practices
If you want to undertake AWS monitoring with the best results, have a look at some of the most ideal AWS monitoring practices:
- Clearly define your AWS monitoring goals
- Have an extensive action plan in place
- Monitor every aspect and parameter that is possible and essential for the smooth functioning of your system
- Have a simple start with native AWS monitoring tools
- Automate the process of AWS monitoring by getting in touch with suitable service providers
- Try resolving issues before they turn into major problems
- Boost accountability by adding owner tags to the instances
- Monitor your AWS costs at every stage
- Capture logs for monitoring compliance and troubleshooting issues in the performance of your application
The Final Word
AWS monitoring plays an important role in ensuring the smooth functioning of your cloud platform and enhancing your business processes. It allows you to make your much-needed shift to the cloud fruitful by identifying issues, remediating them, and helping you keep track of all your processes. By working with the right AWS monitoring service providers, you can attain your business goals while being in sync with the latest technological advancements.
