Cloud Monitoring for Everyone: A Summary of Infrastructure Monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch
Introduction
Monitoring is as old as time. It is as old as checking something that you have done and confirming that it is still the way you made it, left it, or want it to be. As a parent, we practically monitor our children every second of the day to ensure they are always in track, ensuring they are not hurting themselves or doing other things they are not supposed to be doing, or even be in places they should not be.
Cloud Computing is one the greatest innovations in the computing world in the last twenty years. Cloud Computing has to do with having computing resources on-demand and the ability to scale up and down at will. But all these can not come without the ability to understand and analyze the behavior of the systems running in the Cloud environment. Cloud environments are made up of Compute, Database, Machine Learning, Containers, Data Analytics, IoT, and other services. But below all these, a service that is inevitable is the importance of a monitoring system.
It is imperative to understand monitoring works across the different services running in a cloud environment, this gives you more control and insight into the behavior of the application and the cloud environment
Monitoring 101
To be able to understand monitoring we need to go back to the basics, at the beginning of this chapter, I already mentioned a couple of things about it, but get proper monitoring is what the book: Infrastructure Monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch talks about is more elaborate and interesting to read. In Chapter 1, that a great job in introducing monitoring from its core concepts to help you soak that in before going deeper into the book. Even though the book is focused more on monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch, but you can learn a lot of principles that apply to monitoring and observability of all kinds of systems.
In Chapter 2, we started going deeper into the components of monitoring and Amazon CloudWatch with a core focus on CloudWatch Events and CloudWatch Alarms which are the triggers based on specific metrics or activities, and understand the anatomy triggers is important in configuring a proper monitoring system
Other Parts of Monitoring
The first of the book talks about the components of Amazon Cloudwatch and monitoring generally. The second part is focused on monitoring across various AWS services. Because monitoring is peculiar to a specific service, this book takes monitoring one service at a time and explains vividly what to look out for and key metrics in monitoring the availability and reliability of your systems. From Chapter 4, the book looks at the monitoring of Compute services in AWS with a core focus on EC2 instances. How to install and configure monitoring in EC2 instances using Amazon CloudWatch agent. See the video below that explains the steps.
The demonstrations continue in Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 where we talk about container monitoring for both EKS, ECS, and monitoring on different AWS database services respectively.
Apart from just monitoring, this book went further to explain the concept of observability in Chapter 7: Monitoring Serverless Applications. Exploring the core foundations of observability and explains the difference between observability and monitoring, which can be quite controversial but this book deciphers the sort of mystery behind the difference between monitoring and observability.
Chapter 8, Chapter 9, and Chapter 10, focused on Big Data, Storage, and Networking Services respectively, and how to monitor workloads deployed on these AWS services.
In the final chapter of the book, I talk more about best practices to keep in mind when doing monitoring and how Infrastructure As Code (IaC) can be a game-changer in automating monitoring best practices in your organization.
Why this book on monitoring ?
Understanding monitoring for both novices and intermediate engineers has never been this succinct. This book takes you on a journey through the foundations of monitoring and through the different services of AWS, eye-balling monitoring not just from the CloudWatch end, but understanding the behavior of your system based on the data and metrics they emit and be able to take technical and business decisions based on the data that has been collected.
You can purchase the book from the following links: Packt Publishing, Amazon. You can also watch the practical videos from different chapters of the book using this link.
For your comments and feedback on the book, you can connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter.
