As with all administration, monitoring is a critical part of using AWS. Due to the ephemeral nature of cloud resources, and the ability to quickly provision large numbers of new resources, keeping track of and measuring your usage is even more important than when using on-premises systems.
One of the greatest benefits of the cloud is its ability to spin up new resources with the click of a button, or by the use of automation scripts and auto-scaling to create new resources in response to the greater load on the system. However, this advantage can come at a cost if you are not carefully monitoring the infrastructure. As an administrator, you will need to keep a close eye on the cost associated with resource usage, and you will be tasked with providing a view of key performance indicators (KPIs) for your business. This chapter will provide you with the tools and techniques that you need to always know what is happening in your AWS account.
In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:
- AWS Trusted Advisor
- Resource tags
- AWS CloudWatch
- Billing alerts
- The ELK stack
- AWS CloudTrail
- Network logging and troubleshooting
These recipes will give you the foundation that you need in order to handle the routine monitoring of your AWS infrastructure. The value of collecting metrics is the ability to spot trends and relationships (often unknown or unexpected) between disparate systems. With this kind of visibility, you are able to identify and troubleshoot issues before they become an incident.