Skip to content

CloudWatch AWS

What is CloudWatch?

Monitor performance of AWS enviroments - standard infrastructure metrics.

Metrics

AWS cloud watch allows you to record metrics for services such as EBS, EC2, ELB, Route53 Health checks, RDS, Amazon S3, cloudfront etc...

Events

AWS Events delivers a near real-time stream of system events that describe changes in Amazon Web Services(AWS) resources.

Logs

You can use Amazon CloudWatch logs to monitor, store, and access your log fiels from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud(Amazon EC2) instances, AWS CloudTrain, Route53, and other resources.

Alarm

Alarm monitors CloudWatch metrics for instances.

  • Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS)
  • is a web service that coordinates and manages the delivery of sending of messages to subscribing endpoints or clients.
  • alarm will trigger email notification(SNS)

Monitoring

Monitoring shows statistics every 5 minutes

but you can change that to every 1 minute e.g.: EC2 > Instances > Your Instance > Monitoring -> Manage detailed monitoring

Stress Testing

When running this stress then make sure you are not running on a shared VM otherwise you wont get same CPU% in us(cpu user space e.g.: 100.0us). 

#STRESS Installation

# Centos
sudo yum install epel-release -y
sudo yum install stress -y

#Amazon Linux 2
sudo amazon-linux-extras install epel -y
sudo yum install stress -y

# Ubuntu
sudo apt update
sudo apt install stress -y

# stress command
nohup stress -c 4 -t 300 &
top

stress -c 4 -t 60 && sleep 60 && stress -c 4 -t 60 && sleep 60 && stress -c 4 -t 360 && sleep 60 && stress -c 4 -t 460 && sleep 30 && stress -c 4 -t 360 && sleep 60

Cloud Watch

Create an alarm for an instance:

Cloud Watch -> Alarms -> All alarms -> Create alarm -> Select metric -> EC2 > Per-Instance Metrics > Metric name: CPUUtilization

Chose Whenever CPUUtilization is >= Greater/Equal than 60. Chose In Alarm and find select an existing SNS topic