Why You Should Monitor Your AWS Infrastructure

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is almost ubiquitous with the terms “cloud computing” to many. With over 175 services, it is easy to understand why the growth and branding are strong. Here’s a fun game:
Which of these is NOT the name of an AWS Service offering:

• Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
• DynamoDB
• CodeStar
• Lumberyard
• Elemental MediaConvert
• QuickSight

They all are. It is likely you may have heard of many of these, but not all. It is less likely you can give a two-sentence brief on each of them or know what they do. Cloud computing often runs into a problem of scale. The scale of the cloud offerings and the scale of what you need from the cloud are very different. AWS is just one example of how cloud growth is continuing and ever-changing.

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services offers everything from Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) through Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud services. For AWS, it is a matter of meeting its customers where they are. 

Traditional on-premise infrastructure groups are starting to move their infrastructure to a hybrid cloud or exclusively cloud layout. AWS offers services like Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) that provide virtual infrastructure to run servers that are managed by the customer and allow the same flexibility of function as running your own servers. Many of these customers will also use Simple Storage Service (S3) as a service to hold the information needed for their applications to function. These clients will also likely utilize Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to provide the networking protection they are used to running on their own servers. 

However, AWS also targets the world of cloud-native organizations. These organizations will likely leverage cloud services like Lambda, AWS’s serverless on-demand computing power. They may also leverage Kubernetes (k8s), often using AWS’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to provide the implementation of k8s to make their software run. 

There are any number of combinations of AWS services geared to all sectors of the market. You do not need to be a high tech company to leverage AWS. Their goal is to bring cloud computing optimizations to all of their customers, wherever they are, meet them at the level they need, and help them serve their business needs.

Monitor Your AWS

Now that you are adopting your AWS cloud strategy, you will need to be able to monitor and interact with these services to make sure your infrastructure is holding up its end of the bargain. It is nearly impossible for one person to hold the entirety of AWS’s offerings in their head, let alone be able to understand which aspects are important to monitor or be concerned about. Some very obvious metrics to look at are simple status checks for the cloud services you are leveraging. These could be as simple as check that an EC2 instance is functioning, however, it is often more important to understand that the EC2 instance you are looking at is connected to the other services that combine to provide business functionality. For this, LogicMonitor offers a solution called Service Insights that allows you to logically group your monitored services to business-level functionality.

Other known metrics to look for are CPU Utilization. For example, looking at your Relation Database Service (RDS) may be important, but at what level do you need to be concerned? LogicMonitor provides suggested Alert Thresholds for this and many other metrics for AWS cloud services so you can have visibility out-of-the-box to some critical infrastructure.

As you branch out to more niche services, the knowledge of what to monitor may become even fuzzier. For example, what metrics should you monitor for AppStream? LogicMonitor provides an out-of-the-box threshold for helping monitor thresholds of this service. When looking at SageMaker, what metrics matter? LogicMonitor provides several thresholds around disk and memory utilization, as well as suggested thresholds for invocation errors.

AWS can be a tangled mess or it can be a business lifeline. Let LogicMonitor help you understand and optimize your AWS cloud services so that you can focus on the important aspects of running your business. LogicMonitor can be the tool to help you gain confidence in the functionality of your AWS infrastructure and grow your responses to cloud infrastructure needs before they become business-critical outages. With more than 200 out-of-the-box alerts for metrics across the monitored AWS services, you can trust LogicMonitor to help you monitor your infrastructure.

To learn more about how LogicMonitor can help you monitor and understand your AWS usage and infrastructure or to see it in action, sign up for a free trial.