AWS & DevOps: 20 Monitoring Best Practices

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3 min read

AWS & DevOps: 20 Monitoring Best Practices

Maintaining a pulse on the performance, security, and overall health of your AWS environment is critical to ensuring efficient operations. This overview focuses on advanced monitoring best practices on AWS, detailing services that allow for comprehensive application and infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting.

Advanced Monitoring Best Practices

  1. AWS X-Ray for Distributed Tracing: Utilize AWS X-Ray to analyze and debug distributed applications, particularly those built on a microservices architecture.

  2. AWS CloudWatch Anomaly Detection: Deploy machine learning-powered anomaly detection to identify irregularities in your CloudWatch metrics automatically.

  3. Automated Metric Filters and Alarms: Set up automated metric filters and alarms in CloudWatch Logs to monitor application logs.

  4. Detailed Monitoring on EC2: Enable detailed monitoring for higher granularity and quicker data access, aiding faster problem detection and resolution.

  5. CloudWatch Dashboards: Create dashboards in CloudWatch to visualize and aggregate multiple data sources for identifying patterns and troubleshooting issues.

  6. AWS CloudTrail Insights: Leverage CloudTrail Insights to detect unusual account activity and identify errors by analyzing event logs.

  7. Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP): Implement AMP, a Prometheus-compatible service, to monitor container infrastructure and application metrics.

  8. Container Insights: Enable Container Insights for Amazon ECS, EKS, or AWS Fargate to analyze and troubleshoot container performance and logs.

  9. API Call Monitoring with AWS API Gateway: Monitor API activity using a combination of CloudTrail, CloudWatch, and AWS X-Ray for a comprehensive view of API usage.

  10. AWS DMS for Database Migration Monitoring: Monitor replication status when migrating databases using AWS Database Migration Service to ensure seamless operation.

  11. AWS Trusted Advisor for Best Practice Monitoring: Use AWS Trusted Advisor to inspect your AWS environment, providing recommendations for cost reduction, performance improvement, and security enhancement.

  12. Amazon RDS Performance Insights: Employ RDS Performance Insights to evaluate your database load and make informed scaling decisions.

  13. AWS Lambda Insights for Serverless Monitoring: Enable AWS Lambda Insights for a deeper understanding of your Lambda function's performance for real-time problem resolution.

  14. AWS Elastic Beanstalk Health Monitoring: Use Elastic Beanstalk’s environment health monitoring system to keep track of your environments and applications' status.

  15. AWS CloudMap for Service Discovery: Monitor your application's services and resources health using CloudMap's service discovery mechanism.

  16. AWS Personal Health Dashboard: Utilize this service for a personalized view of the health of AWS services underlying your resources.

  17. Amazon Inspector for Security Vulnerability Monitoring: Run regular security assessments using Amazon Inspector to detect vulnerabilities and deviations from best practices.

  18. AWS CloudFormation Drift Detection: Use drift detection to identify discrepancies between your stack's actual and expected configurations.

  19. Amazon Route 53 Health Checks: Employ Amazon Route 53 to monitor the health and performance of your web applications, web servers, and other resources.

  20. Monitor Compute Optimizer Recommendations: Utilize AWS Compute Optimizer for machine learning-driven instance type recommendations to optimize both performance and cost.

To summarize implementing advanced monitoring practices is crucial to maintaining an efficient, secure, and cost-effective AWS environment. By employing these strategies, teams can proactively address issues, ensuring seamless operations and the overall health of their AWS resources.