Introducing Enhanced Application Health Monitoring for AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Posted on: Aug 11, 2015

AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports enhanced application health monitoring. Elastic Beanstalk already makes it easy to deploy and scale your Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker web applications and services on AWS.

Now, Elastic Beanstalk not only monitors the Amazon EC2 and ELB health check statuses but also monitors processes (application, proxy, etc.) and essential metrics (CPU, memory, disk space, etc.) to determine the overall health of your application. This allows Elastic Beanstalk to provide a more complete picture of application health. You no longer need to manually monitor application metrics (e.g., response latency, CPU, disk space, etc.) to determine if you application is performing as expected. Elastic Beanstalk continuously monitors these on your behalf and changes the environment health status to flag any anomalies.

As part of this feature:

  • Health monitoring is now near real-time. Elastic Beanstalk evaluates application health and reports metrics approximately every 10 seconds instead of every minute.
  • Rolling deployments require health checks to pass before a version deployment to a batch of instances is deemed successful. This ensures that any impact due to regressions in application versions is minimized to a batch of instances. For more information, see Deploying Application Versions in Batches.
  • Range of health statuses has been expanded from three (Green, Yellow, and Red) to seven (Ok, Warning, Degraded, Severe, Info, Pending, and Unknown). This allows Elastic Beanstalk to provide you with a more meaningful health status. For more information, see Health Colors and Statuses.
  • Over 40 new metrics (e.g., percentiles of application response times, hard disk space, CPU, etc.), both at the environment and instance level, are available. These metrics can be published to Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring and alarming. For a complete list of available metrics and more information on how to use Amazon CloudWatch with this feature, see Enhanced Health Metrics.

To begin using this feature, log in to the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Management Console or use the EB CLI to create an environment running platform version 2.0.0 or newer.