Category: Monitoring and observability

Organizations have many options for connecting to on-premises networks or third parties, including AWS Site-to-Site VPN. However, some organizations still need to use an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance running VPN software, such as strongSwan. Gaining insight into Amazon EC2-based VPN metrics can be challenging when compared to AWS native VPN services that […]

Amazon CloudWatch RUM makes it easy for AWS customers to access real-world performance metrics from web applications, thereby giving insights into the end-user experience. These user experiences are quantified into discrete metrics that you can then create alarms for. But what if you must have different load time alarms for certain pages? Or you’re testing […]

Amazon CloudWatch has recently launched Metrics Insights (Preview) – a fast, flexible, SQL-based query engine that enables you to identify trends and patterns across millions of operational metrics in real-time. With Metrics Insights, you can easily query and analyze your metrics to gain better visibility into the health and performance of your infrastructure and large scale […]

The updated version (June 2022) that follows is based on working backward from a customer need to understand Service Level Objectives (“SLOs”) and the benefits from monitoring SLOs. This post was originally written in Nov 2021 by Natalia Sikora-Zimna, Product Owner at Nobl9. A service can be provided by infrastructure, a platform, software, or people. […]

In the second post of this two-part series, I will demonstrate how to utilize the Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics canary that uses the multiple HTTP endpoints blueprint in order to monitor an application requiring an authentication certificate. The first post Multi-step API monitoring using Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics provided steps to create an Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics script for executing a […]

Amazon CloudWatch enables customers to collect monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, alarms, and events, thereby allowing easy workload visualization and notifications. Traditionally, operational health data access was only viewable for technical support staff, thereby making operational health opaque to a wider business audience. However, actionable and valuable business insights can […]

We start by paying homage to the Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics canary naming convention, which nods to the original use of canaries to detect carbon monoxide in coal mines. The bird’s small size, high metabolism, and intensified breathing led to their early demise when exposed to the poisonous gas, thereby allowing miners to take corrective action […]

I’m pleased to announce the start of a multi-part series for CloudWatch Billing in which I will explore the techniques for proactively managing your AWS costs. This series kicks off with a walkthrough of setting up CloudWatch Billing Alarms from the AWS console. This walkthrough demonstrates how to enable Billing Alerts, create an Amazon CloudWatch […]

Monitoring application endpoints is a reliable way to measure availability. This best practice can be extended by adding synthetic monitoring to your observability strategy. Synthetic monitoring lets you continually verify your customers’ experience by following the same routes and actions as your customers. You can create scripts or canaries that monitor things such as availability, […]

At re:Invent 2020, we launched Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, a fully managed Prometheus-compatible service in Preview on AWS. It is a secure and scalable service customers can utilize to collect infrastructure and application metrics from workloads hosted on various environments, such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), […]