Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor provides near-continuous internet measurements for your internet traffic, including availability and performance metrics, tailored to your specific workload footprint on AWS. With Internet Monitor, you can get insights into average internet performance metrics over time, as well as get alerts for issues (health events). You’re notified about events that impact your end user experience for applications the clients access through Amazon CloudFront distributions, Amazon WorkSpaces directories, Network Load Balancers, or in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPCs).

Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor’s updated dashboard includes new features for visualizing potential changes and improvements to your configurations. This blog post outlines the onboarding experience and guides you through the new visualization tools to get insights and configure monitoring for your AWS application’s internet traffic.

Prerequisites

For the following sections, we assume that you are familiar with fundamental AWS networking services, such as VPCs and CloudFront distributions. We won’t focus on defining each service, but will outline the steps required for using them with Internet Monitor. You can find detailed information about AWS resources in the corresponding developer and user guides.

Create Internet Monitor

1. To create a monitor, navigate to Internet Monitor under Application Signals in the CloudWatch console, and then choose Create monitor (figure 1).
2. Enter a name for your monitor, and then associate your resources to monitor through Add resources – you can monitor Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), CloudFront distributions (CF), Amazon Workspace directories and Network Load Balancers (NLBs) with internet monitor.

Figure 1. Screenshot of Internet Monitor creation step with required fields

3. Then, you select the internet traffic percentage to monitor to derive the optimal value from the service. We recommend that users select a high traffic percent (>90%) to derive maximum value from the service. By default (shown in figure 1) this field is set at 100% with the flexibility for users to change using Other – Enter a percentage field.

Navigating Monitor Console

There are five pages (tabs) in the Internet Monitor dashboard:

• On the Overview page, you can get an overall view of your monitored traffic, including current performance and availability information, a summary of recent and current health events, and the top suggestion for potentially improving performance for your clients.

Figure 2. Screenshot of Internet Monitor overview tab

• On the Health events page, you can see current and historical health events that currently impact, or previously impacted, locations where clients access your application.

Figure 3. Screenshot of Internet Monitor health events tab

• On the Analyze page, you can view information about top monitored traffic in client locations (by traffic volume), summarized in several customizable ways. You can also see historical trends for health scores and metrics. You can filter by location, ASN, date, and so on, and visualize metrics for your internet traffic over time.

Figure 4. Screenshot of Internet Monitor analyze tab

• On the Configure page, you can see monitor details and configure options, such as the percentage of traffic to monitor.

Figure 5. Screenshot of Internet Monitor configure tab

• On the Optimize page, Internet Monitor predicts your application’s performance improvement for top AWS Regions (or Amazon CloudFront), based on your traffic patterns and past performance. For each top configuration, associated tables provide a breakdown of reduced latency by client location.

Figure 6. Screenshot of Internet Monitor optimize tab

On the second page, you can select multiple Regions (and, if you like, include CloudFront configurations) to compare latency reductions. For each configuration (Region) that you selected, the page displays an associated table of latency details, listed by location

Figure 7. Screenshot of Internet Monitor optimize tab with suggestions for all regions

Enhanced Suggestions

Using the new Optimize tab in the Internet Monitor console you get suggestions for how to optimize application performance for your clients.

Suggestions to reduce latency for top Regions

To help you quickly understand your best options for reducing latency for your clients, Internet Monitor automatically provides suggestions for improving latency in your application for your top Regions (by traffic volume) (figure 6).

Suggestions to reduce latency for all Regions

To explore suggestions for reducing latency for all Regions where clients access your application, choose Optimization suggestions for all Regions to open a new dashboard page. On this page, you can select different Regions to configure, with the option of including CloudFront as a configuration comparison, and then compare the times to first byte (TTFBs) for each selected configuration (figure 7).

Suggestions to reduce latency for top locations

Internet Monitor also provides suggestions for reducing application latency for your clients by specific location. When the table lists multiple suggestions for the same location, expand the city location for that row to see details (figure 6).

By viewing the suggestions on this page, you can start planning configurations and deployments that can improve performance for your clients. Note that you might see a dash (-) instead of a value in a column, when data is not available to display.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we explained the simplified Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor onboarding experience. Also, we covered the new visual experience to get insights and to help making informed decisions with enhanced suggestions. Get started using Internet Monitor for your application today, to take advantage of continuous observability of internet availability and performance, tailored to your workload footprint on AWS.

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