In this chapter, we explored several ways to add monitoring and alerting to our application and infrastructure. We could do it reasonably well by taking advantage of some of the services AWS provides, including CloudWatch, ElasticSearch, and SNS. You can now continue the work of measuring everything. Ultimately, measurement needs to become part of the company culture.

There are several areas to explore, including the following:

• At the infrastructure level, you can start tracking AWS costs and create budgets. You can also put monitoring around your backups to make sure that you aren't missing backup failures.
• At the service level, you can look at X-Ray, the distributed request-tracking service, to monitor performance.
• At the build-and-release pipelines level, with a couple of changes to CloudFormation, CodeDeploy, and CodePipeline, you can start tracking the frequency of deployments and rollbacks. In addition to this, you can do the same to Ansible and create an alert when Ansible returns an error when it runs.
• Quality can also get this kind of treatment. You can start collecting test-code coverage information to make sure you don't push new code without unit testing. It is also interesting to compare outage frequency and bugs/tickets. You can sometimes find a correlation between the quality going down and the outages going up.
• While it may not seem obvious at times, the DevOps movement is first and foremost about people. All those improvements in our process and the adoption of new technologies are means to that end. For that reason, you also want to find ways to track the impact all those changes have on the different people in the company.

In Chapter 8, Hardening the Security of Your AWS Environment, we will continue using some of the components we built in this chapter, but this time, from the perspective of security.