Cloudwatch: Leveraging a Key Performance Monitoring Service

AWS CloudWatch is a powerful tool for optimizing the performance of AWS infrastructure. However, CloudWatch comes with a big deal of management complexity. To ensure your organization is taking all the benefits CloudWatch delivers, cutting complexity is the key.

What Is CloudWatch?

Amazon CloudWatch allows developers, system architects, and administrators to monitor their AWS applications in the cloud, in near-real-time. CloudWatch is automatically configured to provide metrics on request counts, latency, and CPU usage. Users also can send their own logs and custom metrics to CloudWatch for monitoring.

The data and reports CloudWatch provides lets users keep track of application performance, resource use, operational issues, and constraints. This helps organizations resolve technical issues and streamline operations.

Breaking Through Data Silos to Create a Unified View

It isn’t unusual for an organization to have dozens of separate AWS resources, apps, and services running on remote AWS servers and on-premises. As a result, the company’s data can end up residing in departmental silos that are difficult to identify and monitor.

To restore system-wide visibility, CloudWatch combines more than 70 AWS services, including Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), DynamoDB, Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Container Service (ECS), Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and Lambda, all of which are natively integrated. The service supports hybrid cloud architectures via CloudWatch Agent or API for monitoring resources that run on-premises.

Amazon describes its AWS CloudWatch service as a “metrics repository,” but realizing the performance benefits of CloudWatch can be daunting for companies. Source: Amazon Web Services

Gain Operational Insights

CloudWatch visualizes operational data collected from logs, metrics, and events in automated dashboards that deliver a unified view of all AWS resources, apps, and services. Troubleshooting is easier because CloudWatch lets you correlate logs and metrics side-by-side. The data is typically generated in 5-minute increments unless the customer opts in to 1-minute increments (known as enhanced monitoring) at an additional charge.

Alarms can be set to warn when metric values reach specific thresholds, or companies can use machine-learning algorithms to view and respond to unexpected conditions. Some responses can be automated when specific events occur, such as auto-scaling to address fluctuations in resource demand. ‍

Why use Cloudwatch: Leveraging Key Performance Monitoring Service

The last thing DevOps staff and other IT managers want is to be kept awake at night wondering whether their applications are up and running smoothly. It’s one thing to know that something went wrong. It’s quite another to understand why the problem occurred so a permanent solution can be put in place.

  • One dashboard, Access all data
    • The web applications produce a lot of data as they are highly distributed, to access all the data which have been collected you just need a single CloudWatch dashboard.
  • Visibility on the complete Infrastructure
    • You can see through all the AWS resources and services you use, so you can correlate and contradict data produced from multiple services.
  • Improve the total cost of ownership
    • CloudWatch can be used to set high-resolution alarms and can take automated actions while there is a breach in the limits provided. This can help to minimize the costs spent on AWS services
  • Insights from logs
      • You receive detailed insights on separate AWS services and the applications you run on the infrastructure. Data like memory, CPU utilization, and capacity utilization can be monitored and receive insights from it
  • Optimize Applications and resources
    • Using the log and metric data, you can optimize your AWS services to provide maximum throughput and performance.

Partnering With Renova Cloud, An AWS Expert To Plan And Implement CloudWatch

Firms adopting AWS CloudWatch metrics soon run headlong into the complexity of managing such a resource optimization tool. Amazon continues to introduce new features and extensions for AWS.

An alternative to battling CloudWatch’s management complexity head-on is to contract with an AWS managed services partner who uses CloudWatch and many other AWS services to optimize the performance of their clients’ complete AWS infrastructure. That is the approach that Nkid Group chose when it combined its managed services with CloudWatch with the help of Renova Cloud.

The best way to minimize the risk and realize the many benefits CloudWatch makes possible is by tapping the knowledge and expertise of services such as Renova Cloud’s Managed Cloud.