AWS CloudWatch and EC2 Monitoring

Key Points

• CloudWatch Integration with EC2: AWS CloudWatch provides monitoring for EC2 instances, automatically pushing metrics.
• Basic vs. Detailed Monitoring:
  • Basic Monitoring: Metrics are collected every five minutes.
  • Detailed Monitoring: Metrics are collected every one minute (additional costs apply).

Important Metrics for EC2

• CPU Metrics:
  • CPU Utilization
  • CPU Credit Usage and Balance (for T2/T3 burstable instances)
• Network Metrics:
  • Network In/Out
  • Packet Count
• Disk Metrics (Instance Store-backed instances only):
  • Disk Read/Writes Operations
  • Disk Read/Write Bytes
• Status Check Metrics:
  • Instance Status (EC2 VM health)
  • System Status (Underlying hardware health)

Custom Metrics

• Resolution: Basic (1 minute) and High Resolution (up to 1 second)
• Examples: RAM usage, Application-level metrics
• IAM Role: EC2 instances must have an IAM role with permissions to push metrics to CloudWatch.
• It Can be used without enabling detailed monitoring.

Important Notes

• RAM Usage: Not included in AWS-provided EC2 metrics; must be pushed as a custom metric.
• EBS Volumes: Disk Read/Writes metrics for EBS-backed instances are found on the EBS volume, not the EC2 instance.

CloudWatch Dashboard

• Creating a Dashboard: Allows for easy monitoring of various metrics.
• Adding Metrics: Users can select and add metrics to the dashboard for visualization.