Amazon CloudWatch – Wikipedia

Amazon CloudWatch is part of the Amazon Web Services. It is a service that offers various options to monitor your own Amazon web service (AWS) resources. Cloudwatch collects and evaluated data on the performance and use of systems and applications in order to generate an overview that makes it easier to make important decisions. Example: Cloudwatch can be analyzed which load has an application hosted on Amazon EC2, and you can react accordingly and may add other Amazon EC2 instances. [first]

Monitoring [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

Cloudwatch offers the opportunity to monitor various Amazon web service products. The metrics to be monitored differ depending on the product. For EC2, the CPU utilization, hard disk reading and writing operators and the network transfer rate are evaluated. The EC2 instances and images can be viewed individually or summarized. The evaluation takes place via the AWS management console. Here the user has the option of putting together the queries and showing the results as a graph. [2]

Alarm [ Edit | Edit the source text ]

Another feature is to create alarms. Alarms can help react faster to special events. An alarm monitors a metric and sends an email (Amazon Simple Notification Service-SNS) when a pre-defined threshold value is exceeded. For example, if an EC2 image is too high, the user can immediately book a new instance. An alarm can be created via the AWS Management Console or the Command Line. [3]

For Amazon EC2, it is possible to configure an alarm in such a way that it makes autoscaling campaigns. The autoscaling at EC2 enables automatic booking or removing EC2 instances depending on the load. An alarm can therefore independently book an EC2 instance if e.g. B. a defined CPU value is exceeded. [4]

The basis of Cloudwatch is metrics that the Amazon web service products provide. Many AWS products can already support Cloudwatch. The products that support the service send their metrics directly to Cloudwatch. [5] Which metrics are transmitted depends on the type of product. Amazon EC2 sends u. the CPU utilization, hard disk reading and writing operators and the network transfer rate. [2] The data maintenance period includes two weeks.

To be able to correctly evaluate metrics, you get various attributes. A metric always receives a name room (“namepace”), a dimension, a timeline and a unit of measurement. The namespace forms a container that assigns the data to an AWS product (e.g. AWS/EC2 or AWS/ELB). Dimensions are used to use different filters. The dimensions differ depending on the AWS product. For EC2, a dimension would be the instance ID. [5]

Metrics are recorded in the five-minute interval. An interval of one minute can be booked for an additional charge. [6]

The Amazon Web Service is in various regions [7] Offers, the metrics from different regions cannot be summarized and are isolated. [8]

Cloudwatch then uses these metrics to carry out statistical evaluations and to provide them with the user in the form of graphs via the management console. When alarms have been defined, the metrics required for this are checked in a 5 or 1 minute interval. If necessary, emails (Amazon Simple Notification Service-SNS) are sent or EC2 instances are managed according to the autoscaling.

The following AWS products can be monitored with Cloudwatch:

Amazon Cloudwatch Monitoring is free for all customers with an Amazon EC2, EBS, Elastic Load Balancers, or RDS account. There are also free ten alarms per month.

$ 0.015 per instance lesson are charged for reducing the surveillance interval from 5 minutes to 1 minute.

From the 11th alarm, $ 0.10 a month will be charged per alarm. [6]

  1. Amazon (2011): “Amazon CloudWatch: Developer Guide” (PDF; 2,81 MB) S. 2
  2. a b c Amazon (2011): “Amazon CloudWatch: Developer Guide” (PDF; 2,81 MB) S. 9ff
  3. Amazon (2011): “Amazon CloudWatch: Developer Guide” (PDF; 2,81 MB) S. 6ff
  4. Amazon: “Amazon AWS AutoScaling” Amazon AWS website Autoscaling, accessed on May 1, 2011
  5. a b Amazon (2011): “Amazon CloudWatch: Developer Guide” (PDF; 2,81 MB) S. 3
  6. a b Amazon: “Amazon AWS CloudWatch” Amazon AWS website Cloudwatch, accessed on May 1, 2011
  7. Region On amazon.com
  8. Amazon (2011): “Amazon CloudWatch: Developer Guide” (PDF; 2,81 MB) S. 8