AWS - Monitoring and Analytics

Amazon Cloudwatch

web service that enables you to monitor and manage various metrics and configure alarm actions based on data from those metrics; AWS services send metrics to this; near real-time

Cloudwatch alarms

automatically perform actions if the value of your metric has gone above or below a predefined threshold

AWS CloudTrail

records API calls for your account; includes identity, time, source IP address; you can view a complete history of user activity and API calls for your applications and resources

CloudTrail Insights

optional feature allows CloudTrail to automatically detect unusual API activites in your AWS account

AWS Trusted Advisor

web service that inspects your AWS environment and provides real-time recommendations in accordance with AWS best practises; comparies to AWS best practises in five categories; offers a list of recommended actions; provides dashboard

Trusted Advisor categories

Cost Optimization, Performance, Security, Fault Tolerance, Service Limits

AWS Well-Architectured Framework

helps you understand how to design and operate reliable, secure, efficient and cost-effective systems in the AWS Cloud; provides a way for you to consistently measure your architecture against BP and design principles and identify areas for improvement

Well-Architectured Framework six pillars

Operational excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance efficiency, Cost optimisation, Sustainability

Operational excellence

ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures; include performing operations as code, annotating documentation, anticipating failure, frequently making small, reversible changes

Security

ability to protect information, systems and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies; automate security BP when possible, apply security at all layers; protect data in transit and rest

Reliability

ability of a system to do the following; includes testing recovery procedures, scaling horizontally to increase aggregate system availability, and automatically recovering from failure.

Performance efficiency

ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve; experimenting more often; using serverless architectures; designing systems to go global in minutes

Cost optimisation

ability to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point; adopting consumption model, analysing and attributing expenditure, and using managed service to reduce the cost of ownership

Sustainability

ability to continually improve sustainability impacts by reducing energy consumption and increasing efficiency across all components of a workload by maximising the benefits from the provisioned resources and minimising the total resources required

Trade upfront expense for variable expense

swap investing heavily in to data centres and physical servers for only paying when you consume computing resources

Benefit from massive economies of scale

can achieve a lower variable cost that you can get on your own; usage from hundreds of thousands of customers aggregates in the cloud, economies of scale means lower pay as you go prices

Stop guessing capacity

don’t have to predict how much infrastructure capacity you will need before deploying an application; instead of paying for resources that are unused or dealing with limited capacity, you can access only the capacity you need, when you need

Increase speed and agility

flexibility of cloud computing make it easier for you to develop and deploy applications; and provides development teams with more time to experiment and innovate

Stop spending money running and maintaining data centres

instead of spending money and time maintaining infrastructure and servers; focus more on your applications and customers

Go gloabl in minutes

AWS Cloud global footprint enables you to quickly deploy applications to customers around the world, while providing them with low latency