6 Best Practices for AWS Monitoring

Cloud technology

is maturing with every coming day and enterprises are adopting this at a faster rate. It has the potential to handle everyday workloads, data, and applications much more effectively than ever expected. AWS offers a whole suite of cloud-based solutions for organizations of all levels.

However, with the increasing use of cloud solutions for everyday operations, the need for monitoring them is also increased. Well, you don’t have to worry about that too completely as AWS has made some preparations on that front too. Here we present some best practices and first-hand tools to make AWS monitoring a better deal.

Before we move on to that, let us understand what is AWS monitoring.

What is AWS Monitoring?

Monitoring tools help you understand the performance metrics of the system you are using. AWS is surely a cloud platform but monitoring is still an important task. AWS monitoring is a set of practices used to verify the security and performance of your AWS resources.

These practices will help you identify vulnerabilities and issues to predict performance and optimize configurations. Your aim for using a cloud platform like AWS is to improve the performance and efficiency of your system and AWS monitoring tools and practices will help you measure and achieve them at the best.

6 Best Practices for AWS Monitoring

AWS monitoring is not only about managing all the resources efficiently but also making sure that you have taken care of every resource used. It also helps you troubleshoot in case of any issues found. Here are some AWS monitoring practices you can bring to efficiently manage AWS resources:

1. Maximum use of automation

AWS deployments are too huge to monitor manually. Moreover, the data that these deployments generate are also way too bigger to manage and analyze single-handedly. In such cases, using automation in most or all cases can help you achieve efficiency, and eliminate any human error if possible.

2. Policies for priorities

Monitoring tasks need to be prioritized to ensure the critical services and infrastructure run smoothly and the data generated is protected. Besides, you could also use prioritizing alerts or alert categories to ensure that IT teams distribute their time and efforts.

3. Take the proactive approach

Monitor your data for predicting or discovering any possibility of critical service outages or interruptions before time. It is much easier to resolve the problems that might cause major interruptions than waiting for those interruptions to happen and then take action. It also translates to saving wastage of time, efforts, and resources.

4. Cloud advantage

Cloud environments can enable you to experiment with configurations without affecting services, thanks to the flexibility they offer. Take time to test the configuration when you are doing it based on metrics. You can easily figure out if these changes are working out before you could make them official on your platforms.

5. Drill-down approach

The bigger impacts in an IT environment occur when serviceable smaller issues transform into an outage. One of the AWS monitoring best practices is to make sure that these smaller issues are taken care of at every stage in every instance pro-actively so they don’t cause major problems. It also makes sure that every weak link is converted into a stronger one and no backdoors and loopholes are left behind when the infrastructure goes on official systems.

6. All-round data analysis

AWS solutions are comprised of the most powerful instances, tools and services that make it one of the most used cloud platforms in the world. This makes AWS more responsible for helping the community further adopt their platforms for improving business efficiency. When so many services work in tandem, the amount of data they produce together is huge. The right analysis of all-round data from all AWS services can help you form policies and enable multi-point failures.

AWS First Party Monitoring Tools

AWS not only tells you to pick the best tools for monitoring, but it also gives you a list of first-party tools that can help you carry out AWS monitoring efficiently.

1. AWS CloudTrail

AWS CloudTrail helps you record events across all the AWS instances. It automatically records event logs and activity logs for your accounts and stores these logs on S3. User identities, traffic origin IPs, and timestamps are some of the metrics CloudTrail provides. You can also view the management events that occurred in most recent 90 days. There are other data events and insights that you can look forward to by paying an additional fee.

2. AWS CloudWatch

CloudWatch allows you to visualize, aggregate and respond to service metrics. It has two components: events and alarms. Alarms create alerts according to the set threshold for every single metric. Events, on the other hand, can automate responses to metric values, system changes and common incidents.

3. AWS Certificate Manager

Certificate Manager is a tool that allows you to manage and apply Transport Level Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates. These certificates are used to prove your services or device’s authenticity to secure connections.

4. Amazon EC2 Dashboard

EC2 dashboard will help you manage and monitor your EC2 virtual machines. You can easily use this dashboard to monitor and manage your EC2 instances. It gives you information about service health, manages alarms, and status reports, and assesses the volume and instance metrics.

These are some of the first-party services offered by AWS to make sure that efficiency in AWS monitoring is maintained.

AWS monitoring

is an inseparable part of using AWS services and it has to be done effectively. These tools and best practices that we just discussed are going to help you pick the pace of forming the flawless infrastructure for your enterprise and build a successful enterprise solution.