Whether you’re running a small business or an enterprise, it’s critical to ensure all of the services under your responsibility are available. Reacting to incidents as they come up is essential, but proactively monitoring services is key to preventing issues from cropping up in the first place. But when your network stretches from on-premise to the cloud, it can be difficult to keep track of everything that’s happening in both environments, and even more difficult to get a centralized view of all that action. Administrators using AWS can keep their finger on the pulse of their infrastructure by using Amazon CloudWatch, but how do you integrate that data with your in-house network monitoring tools?
In this article, I’ll give you a general overview of AWS CloudWatch, show you how to build an informational dashboard, and then show you how to set up AWS CloudWatch performance monitors in WhatsUp Gold.
What is Amazon CloudWatch?
Amazon CloudWatch is a service from Amazon Web Services that provides users with data and analytics to understand and respond to incidents in their AWS environment. CloudWatch collects logs and event data and gives users a view of the state of their cloud infrastructure.
CloudWatch allows administrators to monitor, create alerts and troubleshoot their AWS infrastructure for many different resources like EC2, S3, RDS, elastic load balancers and more.
Metrics
To get to CloudWatch, head over to the CloudWatch portal and log in. At first glance, you’ll see the summary screen showing you information like alarms, events, logs and all of the available metrics available to you. Depending on the services you have in AWS supported by CloudWatch, your available metrics may differ but notice from the screenshot that I have 34 available to me.
I’ll click on Browse Metrics and see what trouble I can get into here. I immediately notice that CloudWatch categories metrics by different services. In my case, I have EBS, EC2, and S3 with the number of metrics available.
Clicking on EC2, I then choose Per-Instance (AWS categories metrics based on service type) and immediately am presented with all of the available metrics I have at my disposal.
Because we’re just getting started with CloudWatch, I’ve clicked on all of the metrics available to me and notice that they are added to the graph above. If you’re familiar with Windows resource monitor or other performance monitoring graphs, you’ll see the similarities. By default, this graph requires manually refreshing, but I’ve chosen to Auto-Refresh it every 10 seconds. In the screenshot below, I’ve also chosen to see one hour’s worth of data.
Alerts
That’s a pretty graph to stare at but not about to spend my day gazing into an auto-refreshing graph hoping I don’t see any abnormal activity. Instead, I’d like to be alerted when a certain threshold is met. To do that, I can create an alarm. In CloudWatch, alarms allow users to be notified via email when a metric has met or exceeded a specified threshold.
On the Create Alert screen, once you’ve chosen the metric you’d like to track, you can then set the threshold a few different ways by setting the start to ALARM when the metric exceeds a certain threshold, is under a threshold and how many data points (polling intervals) the metric has to be at that point before an alarm is triggered. If you’re not familiar with what is considered “normal”, you also have the graph on the right in the screenshot below to give you an indication of what the metric is usually at.
Events
CloudWatch also allows the user not only to monitor various performance metrics and alerts on those metrics but can also perform actions when specific events happen. This allows the user to automate multiple tasks when triggered by many different activities occurring in their AWS environment. By clicking on the Events section, the user can create rules to subscribe to these events and take action.
In the screenshot below, I’ve chosen to create a rule to monitor my S3 buckets for all events, although I could have gotten more granular. Notice that by selecting the dropdowns in the event source section, the UI automatically creates the event pattern. This will be the JSON CloudWatch consumes when setting up this event listener.
I’ve already set up a Lambda function as well, so I’ve chosen that. This will ensure when any activity happens in any of my S3 buckets, my Lambda function will automatically be triggered.
If, for example, I don’t necessarily want to invoke my Lambda function on a specific event, I could also set up a schedule as seen below. A schedule allows me to be sure my Lambda function gets invoked without having to depend on a certain event firing.
Logs
CloudWatch isn’t tied to the AWS event bus but can also display, summarize, and alert on text file logging activity as well. This feature allows users to install a logging agent on EC2 instances to send text file log information like Apache logs, get notified of operating system-specific events or keep tabs on event logs. To do that, Amazon has a informative tutorial page on how to set up the logging agent.
Since I don’t have any EC2 instances set up in my demo environment, I’m not able to set up the logging agent and show screenshots of the data gathered. If you’d like more information on using the Logs feature of CloudWatch, I encourage you to check out Amazon CloudWatch Logs page for more details.
Dashboards
Using Dashboards, users can create informational dashboards displaying lots of different data all in a single place. This is especially useful when a user needs to get a bird’s eye view of the state of their infrastructure.
Creating a new dashboard consists of adding one or more widgets.
For this article, I’ll add a line metric widget to give me an overview of various metrics over time. Once I add the widget, I’m presented with a screen exactly like the metric screen we were looking at earlier. This time, however, we’re able to combine this graph with another source of information in the dashboard.
By clicking on Add Widget, I’m able to add multiple different types of widgets including the aforementioned line graph, stacked area graphs, numbers to see the last value of a metric, and even a free text widget that allows users to display text in their dashboard.
Just like we can with metrics, we’re able to adjust the refresh interval for all of the widget data on the right-hand side. We’re also able to manage dashboards in the Actions drop-down and perform tasks like save dashboards, rename, delete them, and so on.
Setting up CloudWatch Performance Monitors in WUG
This is all well and good if you want to see AWS performance from within CloudWatch, but what if you want to see these metrics in relation to your broader network? Thanks to AWS’s API, you can! Let’s go over how to set up CloudWatch performance monitors in WhatsUp Gold.
WhatsUp Gold’s AWS CloudWatch Performance Monitor lets you view the performance statistics Amazon collects about your network resources and configure thresholds for specific metrics used to trigger alerts in the event the specified metric falls below or rises above a defined value.
- From your Network Map in WhatsUp Gold, navigate to the WhatsUp Gold Monitor Library (SETTINGS > Libraries > Monitors)
- Select the AWS CloudWatch Performance Monitor and configure the following fields to set up your monitor:
- Name. Enter a unique name for the monitor. This name displays in the Performance Monitor Library.
- Description. Enter additional information for the monitor. This description displays next to the monitor name in the Performance Monitor Library.
- Click Edit to begin selecting specific metrics to monitor.
- Select your Region and valid AWS Credential from the respective lists, then click Connect.
- Select the AWS Namespace, Metric, and Statistic from the respective lists under Choose Metric.
- Choose an instance set from the list of Available instance sets under Choose Instance. Individual instances in the specified set from which to select for monitoring appear below.
- Select an Instance to monitor. Once loaded, you can click Load data to preview available instance data.
- Click Select to return to the performance monitor configuration dialog.
- Click Save.
Congrats! You’re now monitoring AWS performance metrics with WhatsUp Gold!
Summary
Amazon CloudWatch is a great tool for up/down alerts and performance monitoring, and getting started with CloudWatch is a straightforward process that I encourage you to try for yourself. But, as with any cloud-native monitoring tool, CloudWatch won’t give you a full picture of your network beyond the cloud. By integrating CloudWatch with a full-fledged monitoring solution, you get both an in-depth view of AWS performance metrics, and a holistic network view. What’s more, you’ll benefit from improved data retention over CloudWatch’s standard options (15 days to 15 months).