Cloudwatch provides quick and easy access to your AWS Service metrics with dashboarding and alerting.
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Amazon Cloudwatch to monitor the health of our infrastructure running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Particularly the health of EC2 instances and RDS to ensure that our services are performing as expected. The service provides us with visibility and alerting helps us address problems quickly before they have an impact on customers.
Pros
- Cloudwatch allows us to configure thresholds to trigger alerts
- We can combine different metrics onto dashboards for different stakeholders
- We can go back and look at trends over time for particular metrics
Cons
- Dashboards are relatively basic
- Its not possible, or difficult to write queries to correlate easily between different metrics
- Searching through logs can be difficult if they are not structured well in advance
Return on Investment
- Cloudwatch provides similar functionality to other tools available. However, it is easily available within AWS and can be used with minimal setup.
- It is easy to let costs add up if using multiple custom metrics or more detailed metrics and retentions than necessary; we ensure that we retain the data in Cloudwatch for the minimum amount of time to be of value for Ops monitoring and then move to other tools such as Splunk for longer retention.
- Alerting within Cloudwatch allows us to react quickly when thresholds are unmet or exceeded.
Usability
Alternatives Considered
Splunk IT Essentials, Splunk Cloud, Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) and Splunk On-Call
Other Software Used
Splunk Cloud, Splunk Synthetic Monitoring, Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI)
