Amazon CloudWatch

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Amazon CloudWatch is part of the Amazon Web Service . It is a service that offers various options for monitoring your own Amazon Web Service (AWS) resources. With CloudWatch, data on the performance and utilization of systems and applications are collected and evaluated in order to generate an overview that makes it easier to make important decisions. Example: CloudWatch can be used to analyze the workload of an application hosted on Amazon EC2 , and you can react accordingly and possibly book additional Amazon EC2 instances.

Leverage CloudWatch

Monitoring

CloudWatch offers the possibility to monitor various Amazon web service products. The metrics to be monitored differ depending on the product. For EC2, the CPU utilization, hard disk read and write operators and the network transfer rate are evaluated. The EC2 instances and images can be viewed individually or together. The evaluation takes place via the AWS Management Console. Here the user has the option of compiling the queries and displaying the results as a graph.

Alarms

Another feature is the creation of alarms. Alarms can help to react more quickly to special events. An alarm monitors a metric and sends an email (Amazon Simple Notification Service - SNS) when a predefined threshold is exceeded. For example, if the CPU utilization of an EC2 image is too high, the user can book a new instance immediately. An alarm can be created through the AWS Management Console or the command line.

For Amazon EC2, it is possible to configure an alarm to carry out auto- scaling actions. AutoScaling with EC2 enables the automatic addition or removal of EC2 instances depending on the workload. An alarm can thus independently book an EC2 instance, if z. B. a defined CPU value is exceeded.

implementation

CloudWatch is based on the metrics provided by the Amazon web service products. Many AWS products can already support CloudWatch. The products that support the service send their metrics directly to CloudWatch. The metrics that are transmitted depend on the type of product. Amazon EC2 may send a. the CPU usage, hard disk read and write operators and the network transfer rate. The data retention period is two weeks.

In order to be able to evaluate metrics correctly, they are given various attributes. A metric always has a namespace, a dimension, a time stamp and a unit of measurement. The namespace forms a container that assigns the data to an AWS product (e.g. AWS / EC2 or AWS / ELB). Dimensions are used to apply different filters. The dimensions differ depending on the AWS product. For EC2, one dimension would be the instance ID.

Metrics are collected every five minutes. An interval of one minute can be booked for an additional charge.

The Amazon Web Service is offered in different regions, the metrics from different regions cannot be summarized and are isolated.

CloudWatch then uses these metrics to carry out statistical evaluations and provide them to the user in the form of graphs via the management console. If alarms have been defined, the necessary metrics are checked at 5 or 1 minute intervals. If necessary, e-mails (Amazon Simple Notification Service - SNS) are sent or EC2 instances are managed in accordance with AutoScaling.

Supported AWS Products

The following AWS products can be monitored with CloudWatch:

Prices

Monitoring of Amazon CloudWatch is free for all customers with an Amazon EC2, EBS, Elastic Load Balancers, or RDS account. There are also ten free alarms per month.

Decreasing the monitoring interval of metrics from 5 minutes to 1 minute is charged at $ 0.015 per instance hour.

After the 11th alarm, you will be billed $ 0.10 per month per alarm.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Amazon (2011): "Amazon CloudWatch: Developer Guide" (PDF; 2.81 MB) p. 2
  2. ↑ a b c Amazon (2011): "Amazon CloudWatch: Developer Guide" (PDF; 2.81 MB) p. 9ff
  3. ↑ Amazon (2011): "Amazon CloudWatch: Developer Guide" (PDF; 2.81 MB) p. 6ff
  4. ↑ Amazon: "Amazon AWS AutoScaling" Amazon AWS Wesite AutoScaling, accessed May 1, 2011
  5. ↑ a b Amazon (2011): "Amazon CloudWatch: Developer Guide" (PDF; 2.81 MB) p. 3
  6. ↑ a b Amazon: "Amazon AWS CloudWatch" Amazon AWS Wesite CloudWatch, accessed May 1, 2011
  7. ↑ Regions on Amazon.com
  8. ↑ Amazon (2011): "Amazon CloudWatch: Developer Guide" (PDF; 2.81 MB) p. 8