Monitoring and Metrics for EC2

1. Introduction

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Monitoring and metrics are essential to ensure operational health, performance, and cost optimization of EC2 instances. This lesson covers important concepts and practical steps for monitoring EC2 instances efficiently.

2. Key Concepts

• **CloudWatch**: AWS service for monitoring resources and applications in real-time.
• **Metrics**: Data points that provide insights into the performance and health of EC2 instances.
• **Alarms**: Notifications set up to alert users of certain thresholds being breached.

3. Monitoring Tools

AWS offers several tools for monitoring EC2 instances:

• **Amazon CloudWatch**: Provides metrics and logs for your EC2 instances.
• **AWS Systems Manager**: Offers operational data from multiple AWS services.
• **AWS CloudTrail**: Helps you monitor API calls made on your account.

4. Key Metrics

Some of the most critical metrics to monitor for EC2 instances include:

1. **CPU Utilization**: Indicates how much processing power is being used.
2. **Disk Reads/Writes**: Measures the amount of data being read from or written to disk.
3. **Network In/Out**: Monitors incoming and outgoing network traffic.

5. Best Practices

To effectively monitor EC2 instances, consider the following best practices:

• **Use CloudWatch Dashboards**: Create dashboards to visualize metrics.
• **Set Alarms**: Configure alarms for thresholds that require immediate attention.
• **Leverage Tags**: Tag instances for better organization and monitoring.

6. FAQ

7. Conclusion

Monitoring EC2 instances is crucial for maintaining performance and reliability. By leveraging tools like CloudWatch and following best practices, you can ensure your instances run optimally.