The Network Administrator Survival Kit

With Amazon CloudWatch, in addition to monitoring the built-in metrics that come with AWS, you can monitor with your custom metrics. This new custom metrics feature can be used in two different ways: 1. You can add to the metrics collected for Amazon EC2 Instances, EBS Volumes, Elastic Load Balancers, and Relational Database Service DB Instances. The metrics that you store can be technical (system performance indicators) or business-related (user activity over the monitoring period). 2. You can store metrics for any generic resource. You can use CloudWatch to create a single, integrated storage and aggregation point for all of the metrics that you want to watch and to monitor. In the exam (at least the test exam) you are asked to pick which ones are custom metrics. Therefore, go through the available AWS metrics so you will get an idea of which metric is likely to be a custom metric when you are asked the question. You can browse through the list of built-in metr...

Amazon EC2 instances are monitored by Amazon CloudWatch by default. The default monitoring is called the Basic Monitoring. Basic Monitoring includes seven pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency and three status check metrics at one-minute frequency for no additional charge. However, when you first launch an EC2 instance, you have the option of enabling detailed monitoring. Detailed Monitoring includes all the metrics available in Basic Monitoring but at one-minute frequency. Instances with Detailed Monitoring enabled allows data aggregation by Amazon EC2 AMI ID and instance type. Detailed Monitoring has an additional fee if selected. Once an EC2 instance has been launched, you can always toggle detailed monitoring on or off later. This is useful for troubleshooting. So the recommendation is to NOT turn detailed monitoring on initially. If autoscaling or elastic load balancing is being used, CloudWatch will also provide Amazon EC2 instance metrics aggregated by Auto...

Amazon CloudWatch CloudWatch is an AWS service which lets you monitor the performance and availability of your AWS resources. The resources include Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon DynamoDB tables, Amazon RDS DB instances, as well as custom metrics and logs generated by your own applications and services. It can also be used to monitor the billing costs. CloudWatch can be used to collect and track metrics, collect and monitor logs, set alarms and automatically react to changes in your AWS resources. No additional software is required for CloudWatch monitoring. However, when you launch a new EC2 instance, you have a choice of enabling detailed monitoring. Detailed monitoring has an additional charge while non-detailed monitoring is free and enabled by default. However, you can choose to enable or disable detailed monitoring at any time and only pay for what you use. This can come in handy if you want more granularity while you are troubleshooting issues with your applications running o...