What is

AWS monitoring is the process of tracking and optimizing the performance of your AWS infrastructure. It enables you to gain complete end-to-end visibility of your resources, detect anomalies, perform root cause analysis using logs, ensure high uptime, maintain cloud security, and meet internal and external compliance standards.

An AWS monitoring tool helps by collecting, analyzing, and visualizing data from AWS resources. It detects performance issues, tracks uptime, alerts on anomalies, and ensures efficient resource usage. This enables proactive troubleshooting, better decision-making, and improved reliability of cloud-based applications, helping teams maintain optimal service health and user experience.

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What are the types of AWS monitoring?

Infrastructure monitoring

Tracks the health and performance of EC2 instances, auto-scaling groups, EBS volumes, and more.

Application performance monitoring

Monitors the performance of web applications, services, and transactions running on AWS.

Cloud resource monitoring

Keeps tabs on S3 storage usage, database performance (e.g., RDS and DynamoDB), and network traffic.

Log monitoring

Collects and analyzes logs from AWS services, like CloudWatch Logs, CloudTrail, and custom apps, to support debugging, auditing, and security.

Cloud cost monitoring

Tracks AWS spending across services, detects cost spikes, and helps optimize usage to stay within budget.

Serverless monitoring

Monitors AWS Lambda functions by tracking invocation counts, durations, errors, and cold starts to ensure smooth execution.

How does AWS monitoring work?

AWS monitoring works by continuously collecting, analyzing, and visualizing data from your AWS environment to help you ensure performance, availability, and security. Here's how it typically works:

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Data collection

AWS services generate performance and usage data, including information like CPU usage, network traffic, error logs, and billing info. This data is collected through native tools like Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, and X-Ray, or third-party AWS monitoring tools like Site24x7.

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Real-time dashboarding and visualization

The data is visualized through graphs, charts, and custom dashboards that show performance trends, service health, and anomalies at a glance.

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Data aggregation

Monitoring tools pull this data into a centralized platform where it's organized by service, region, or resource type.

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Alerting and notifications

Thresholds can be set on key metrics (e.g., CPU > 80%, database latency > 200ms), triggering alerts via email, SMS, Slack, or integrations like PagerDuty.

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Automated actions

Monitoring tools can also automate remediation—like restarting instances, scaling services, or running Lambda functions when thresholds are breached.

How does AWS monitoring work?

AWS monitoring challenges

Monitoring AWS infrastructure is essential, but it comes with its own set of challenges:

Too many services

AWS offers hundreds of services, making it complex to monitor all interdependencies.

Metric overload

CloudWatch alone can generate thousands of metrics—filtering the noise to find what matters is tricky.

Limited visibility

Native tools offer siloed views—it's tough to get a unified picture of hybrid or multi-cloud setups.

Alert fatigue

Without proper configuration, alerts can overwhelm your team, making it hard to identify critical issues.

Manual configuration

Setting up dashboards, alerts, and logs can be time-consuming if done from scratch.

Dynamic environments

Auto-scaling, short-lived containers, and serverless functions make it hard to track constantly changing resources in real time.

Why choose an AWS monitoring tool?

Using a dedicated AWS monitoring tool provides several benefits:

  • Unified view
  • Proactive alerts
  • In-depth analytics
  • Automation
  • Custom dashboards and reporting
  • Improved troubleshooting
  • Cost optimization

How to choose the best AWS monitoring tool

When selecting an AWS monitoring tool, consider the following factors:

  • Service coverage: Does it support all the AWS services you're using?
  • Real-time monitoring: Can it provide accurate, near-real-time insights and alerts?
  • Cost efficiency: Are pricing models clear, and do they scale well with your infrastructure?
  • Ease of use: Is it easy to set up and use for your team?
  • Integration support: Does it integrate with other tools in your DevOps stack?
  • Advanced features: Look for AI-powered insights, anomaly detection, and automated remediation.

Why choose Site24x7?

Site24x7 is a powerful cloud-native monitoring platform that gives you deep visibility into your AWS environment—alongside your entire IT infrastructure.

Comprehensive AWS coverage

Monitor over 80 AWS services, including EC2, RDS, Lambda, ELB, DynamoDB, and S3.

Unified dashboard

View cloud, on-premises, and hybrid infrastructure metrics in one place.

AI-powered monitoring

Detect anomalies and forecast resource needs, along with over 150 best practice recommendations and a robust automation framework.

Smart alerts

Cut through noise with intelligent alerting based on thresholds, dependencies, and baselines.

Seamless integrations

Connect easily with Slack, PagerDuty, ServiceNow, and other tools.

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