Amazon CloudWatch

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Features of Amazon CloudWatch

• Amazon CloudWatch enables you to monitor your Amazon EC2 instances and Elastic Load Balancers in real-time.
• Amazon CloudWatch enables Auto Scaling, which allows you to dynamically add or remove Amazon EC2 instances based on Amazon CloudWatch metrics. Auto Scaling is free to Amazon CloudWatch customers.
• You pay as you go and only incur Amazon CloudWatch fees for Amazon EC2 instances you choose to monitor.
• If you’re signed up for the Amazon EC2 service, you’re already registered to use Amazon CloudWatch and can begin using the feature via the AWS Management Console.
• You do not need to install additional software to monitor Amazon EC2 or Elastic Load Balancers.

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Using Amazon CloudWatch

Getting started with using Amazon CloudWatch is easy. If you are signed up for the Amazon EC2 service, you are automatically registered for Amazon CloudWatch. You simply:

• Sign in to the AWS Management Console.
• On the Amazon EC2 tab, click the Launch Instances button.
• Select the AMI to launch an instance, select the key pair and configure the firewall.
• On the last step, click the “Enable CloudWatch monitoring for this instance” checkbox.
• Click the Launch button.
• Within minutes, the instance you just launched will show as running.
• Select the running instance from the list and click on the Monitoring tab at the bottom.
• Graphs for CPU, Disk and Network metrics are displayed for the instance you selected.

In addition to launching instances with monitoring enabled, you can also select an existing running instance and enable monitoring.

All the steps mentioned above are also available as Amazon EC2 and Amazon CloudWatch Command Line Tools and APIs.

Amazon CloudWatch provides customers with visibility into resource utilization, operational issues, and overall demand patterns. Amazon CloudWatch can aggregate and report metrics for CPU utilization, data transfer, and the disk usage and activity for each Amazon EC2 instance. It also monitors Elastic Load Balancers for metrics such as request count and request latency. Amazon CloudWatch can aggregate data by Availability Zone, Auto Scaling Group, AMI type or Elastic Load Balancer. Monitoring data is persisted for 2 weeks, even if the Amazon EC2 instances or Elastic Load Balancers have been terminated. This enables you to quickly look back at the metrics preceding an event of interest to you.

Amazon CloudWatch enables Auto Scaling, which allows you to dynamically add or remove Amazon EC2 instances based on Amazon CloudWatch metrics. You can define conditions upon which you want to scale up or down your Amazon EC2 instances. When Auto Scaling detects that the conditions have been met, it automatically adds or removes the specified amount of Amazon EC2 instances. This ability to dynamically add and remove Amazon EC2 instances enables you to follow your application demand curve much more closely than ever before.

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Projecting Costs

With Amazon CloudWatch, you only pay for what you use. Amazon CloudWatch is charged by the number of Amazon EC2 instances you monitor, at a rate of $0.015 per hour for each Amazon EC2 instance you choose to monitor. You will be charged at the end of each month for your Amazon EC2 instances monitored by Amazon CloudWatch.

As an example, a developer may want to monitor 10 Amazon EC2 instances 24×7 for a 30-day period. The Amazon CloudWatch cost would be $108 (or $0.015 per Amazon EC2 instance hour x 10 Amazon EC2 instances x 24 hours per day x 30 days). Partial hours will be billed as full hours. Regular Amazon EC2 service fees apply and are billed separately.

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Resources