Workloads can run with exceptional scalability and flexibility in AWS. However, that also means there can be a lot to monitor. To make sure your cloud environment is safe, secure, and economical, every element-from Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances and Relational Database Service (RDS) databases to IAM roles and Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets-needs to be observed. This is where a monitoring checklist becomes crucial.
Why an AWS monitoring checklist is important
Using an AWS monitoring checklist keeps you proactive and organized. It guarantees that you're covering all the important topics, including cost anomalies, security events, application health, and system performance. A checklist helps you identify issues early, sometimes even before they arise, rather than responding to them after they impact users or budgets.
It offers consistency as well. A standardized checklist ensures that everyone is in agreement and that no crucial monitoring step is overlooked, regardless of whether you are a DevOps engineer or a member of a sizable cloud team. Additionally, your checklist can transform from a static document into a real-time, self-improving system when paired with tools like Site24x7, which provides automation, AI-powered alerts, and out-of-the-box AWS integrations.
5 essential elements for your AWS monitoring checklist
Here's a list of five important items that you must include in your AWS monitoring checklist:
1. Set up metrics and alarms
Start your AWS monitoring by setting up essential metrics and alarms. Keep a close eye on CPU utilization, memory usage, disk I/O, and network traffic across key services like EC2, RDS, Lambda, and Elastic Load Balancing. These metrics are your baseline for understanding infrastructure performance.
Define clear thresholds for each metric and configure alarms to alert your team when those thresholds are breached. This helps you catch performance degradation or outages before they affect users. With Site24x7, you can simplify this process by leveraging built-in integrations with more than 80 AWS services to automatically pull and visualize these metrics. It also allows you to configure custom metrics and create alert profiles based on your unique workload requirements.
2. Enable centralized logging
After setting up, make sure logging is centralized and enabled. AppLogs, Site24x7's log management tool, allows you to aggregate logs from services such as CloudFront, Lambda, S3, and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Flow Logs. It gives your entire observability strategy structure and clarity in addition to assisting you in tracking down events and troubleshooting problems.
With centralized logging, your team has a single source of truth and can correlate data in one location rather than hopping between various AWS consoles or regional log views. For example, if a user encounters a failed transaction in your app, centralized logs enable you to track the request from API Gateway, through Lambda, to the database query, and even to the firewall rules in VPC, helping you identify the problem in minutes.
3. Track application performance
Another crucial element is keeping an eye on application performance. In addition to infrastructure metrics, it is crucial to track the behavior of your applications, including response times, error rates, and transaction paths. Distributed tracing, a feature of Site24x7's application performance monitoring (APM), makes it easier to see how requests move through the microservices in your application. You can also see failed components and performance bottlenecks with APM. Additionally, Site24x7 offers agent-based monitoring for EC2 instances, which ensures comprehensive coverage by providing you with insights into server dependencies and processes at both the OS and hypervisor levels.
4. Automate remediation
The real power of monitoring lies in automation. You must automate responses based on alerts and conditions rather than responding to every problem manually. Site24x7's robust IT automation framework is deeply integrated with AWS monitoring, enabling automated actions based on predetermined thresholds. It facilitates operational simplification and guarantees prompt, low-effort reactions to important events.
For instance, EC2 instances that are perfect for automated recovery scenarios can have their start, stop, or reboot processes automated. In these situations, Site24x7 can identify malfunctions or violations of the memory threshold and restart the instance automatically, reducing downtime and ensuring uninterrupted service availability.
5. Optimize cloud costs
Another important area to keep an eye on is cost-optimization. Find underutilized or idle resources, such as unattached Elastic Block Store volumes that covertly increase storage expenses or EC2 instances that aren't getting any traffic. The Guidance Report from Site24x7 offers useful suggestions in this area. Additionally, ManageEngine CloudSpend expands on this by incorporating usage patterns and cost-related insights, enabling you to monitor spending patterns, track budgets, and proactively cut waste. This helps keep your AWS bill consistent and manageable.
Mastering AWS monitoring for a resilient cloud environment
Monitoring your AWS environment isn't just about collecting data; it's about making that data work for you. A solid AWS monitoring checklist helps you cover all the bases, from tracking key metrics and logs to ensuring security, optimizing costs, and automating responses. With the right strategy, you can shift from reactive firefighting to proactive cloud management.
Site24x7's AWS monitoring tool helps in this journey by offering deep AWS integrations, intelligent alerts, centralized logging, and automation capabilities that reduce manual effort and boost operational efficiency.