Monitor Your Internet-Facing Applications with AWS CloudWatch Internet Monitor
AWS CloudWatch Internet Monitor is a service that helps you monitor the availability and performance of your internet-facing applications. It does this by sending probes to your application from different locations around the world, and then measuring the latency, and packet loss of the connections.
CloudWatch Internet Monitor uses a global network of probes to monitor the internet. These probes are located in different cities around the world, and they are connected to the internet through different networks. When you create an internet monitor, CloudWatch Internet Monitor will select a set of probes that are closest to your application. These probes will then send requests to your application, and CloudWatch Internet Monitor will measure the performance of the connections.
With CloudWatch Internet Monitor, we can monitor the following metrics.
Availability: CloudWatch Internet Monitor can detect when your application is unavailable. It does this by sending probes to your application at regular intervals. If a probe fails to connect to your application, CloudWatch Internet Monitor will send you an alert.
Performance: CloudWatch Internet Monitor can measure the performance of your application. It does this by measuring the latency, jitter, and packet loss of the connections between the probes and your application.
Geolocation: CloudWatch Internet Monitor can track the location of your users. It does this by measuring the IP addresses of the users who connect to your application.
ISPs: CloudWatch Internet Monitor can track the ISPs of your users. It does this by measuring the AS numbers of the networks that the users are connected to.
Key Components:
Monitor: A monitor serves as the receptacle for your established parameters, designating which resources are subject to observation.
Health Event: In instances where the Internet Monitor identifies noteworthy degradation in your network performance, it initiates a health event. Each such event provides detailed information about the affected client locations and the involved Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
Performance and Availability Scores (Health Scores): These are statistical approximations of the fraction of traffic to your application that remains unaffected by any dips in performance or availability. These scores can also be accessed as metrics in CloudWatch.
CloudWatch Logs: Catering to the locations and network providers that are particular to your clients, the Internet Monitor disseminates measurements to CloudWatch Logs. These measurements encompass performance and availability scores, the volume of data transferred, and the round-trip time (RTT).
Now that we know what Internet Monitor is, let’s create a simple monitor and experience the product.
Head over to CloudWatch Console, click on the Internet Monitors tab, then click Create Internet Monitor button.
Wait for a while for data to be collected. The check the CloudWatch Console.
Internet Monitor also logs each event to CloudWatch Logs.
Let’s check out the City one
That’s neat, you see traffic coming from all over the globe.
Don’t forget to remove the resources created in this tutorial. Click Disable Internet Monitor, then Delete.
AWS CloudWatch Internet Monitor is a powerful tool that can help you monitor the availability and performance of your internet-facing applications. It is easy to use and configure, and it provides a wealth of metrics that you can use to track the performance of your applications.
