Category: Management Tools

April 20, 2021: This blog post has been superseded by AWS CloudTrail Best Practices.

Introduction Many AWS customers either integrate ServiceNow into their existing AWS services or set up both ServiceNow and AWS services for simultaneous use. One challenge in this use case is the need to update your configuration management database (CMDB) when a new spin-up instance appears in AWS. This post demonstrates how to integrate AWS Config […]

In large enterprise organizations, it’s challenging to maintain standardization across environments. This is especially true if these environments are provisioned in a self-service manner—and even more so when new users access these provisioning services. In this post, I describe how we at Verizon found a balance operating between agility, governance, and standardization for our AWS […]

Organizations are evolving IT processes to include data lakes and supporting services. Your organization might start by looking to extend the self-service portals you built using AWS Service Catalog to create data lakes as well. A self-service portal lets users vend required AWS resources within the guardrails defined by your cloud center of excellence (CCOE) […]

In a world of highly distributed applications and increasingly bespoke architectures, data monitoring tools help DevOps engineers stay abreast of ongoing system problems. This post focuses on one such feature: Amazon VPC Flow Logs. In this post, I explain how you can deliver flow log data to Amazon S3 and then use Amazon Athena to […]

Enterprises deploy AWS resources and services daily to support different business objectives. For example: A data scientist might like to create an EMR cluster for a job that should not take longer than one week. A sales engineer needs a demo environment for two days. A marketing application owner wants a marketing application to run […]

AWS Systems Manager, the operational hub for AWS and hybrid cloud deployments, recently announced the launch of OpsCenter to help you view, investigate, and resolve operational issues related to your environment from a central location. OpsCenter presents operational issues in a standardized view, along with contextually relevant data, and associated Systems Manager Automation documents, enabling […]

Simplifying Apache server logs with Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights Monitoring web server logs is important for diagnosing problems, understanding the root causes, and spotting potential security-relevant activity on your web server. The Apache HTTP Server log format is not easily readable, though. The volume and size of these text-based logs makes it difficult to see […]

On-call engineers are responsible for responding to alerts, troubleshooting high priority incidents, and taking action to remediate issues. Automation tools like AWS Systems Manager and Atlassian Opsgenie can help these engineers by reducing repetitive work and allowing them to focus on the most important tasks. In this blog post, Merve Bolat, Associate Product Manager at […]

To provide a reliable service to your customers, you need to make sure that your business-critical applications are healthy. If you have ever been involved in the monitoring process, you’re probably already aware of its complexity. You need to identify and configure the right set of monitors for various parts of your application and infrastructure, […]