Understand the Components of Monitoring

• Every monitoring architecture or setup works with same base components, They are
  • Alerts/notifications:
    • A alert/notification is an event that is triggered to inform the system Admin or Cloud Engineer about a potential issue or issue that has already happened
    • Notifications can be sent using different media Email, SMS, Pager Alert, Mobile App Push Notifications.
    • In AWS there is a Service called as Amazon SNS (Simple Notification System) where we can configure alerts/notifications
  • Events:
    • Any action or activity or series of activities that occur in a system is called an event
    • The ability to track each of thes events is very important in monitoring software systems and applications
  • Logging:
    • A log is historical record of an event.
    • A log contains details of the event and also the time when event occured.
    • Logs are generally text files in formats such as (.txt, .json, .xml)
    • Analyzing Logs to improve troubleshooting is an important action for admins.
  • Metrics
    • A metric is an information about a resource at certain point of time
    • Examples: Free disk space, memory consumption, cpu usage etc
  • System Availability:
    • Availability = (uptime)/(uptime+downtime)
  • Incidents: Some issue that has caused the failure of the system
• Note: MTTR (Mean time to Recover)

AWS CloudWatch

• This is a Service designed by AWS which is end-to-end monitoring solution, used for monitoring applications, server, serverless application, on-premises systems and many more.
• Cloud Watch has the ability
  • to collect and store logs of the applications deployed in any environment
  • to collect metrics and create dashboards
  • to use SNS to send notifications of failures
  • to capture inbuilt Events
  • to take corrective actions