AWS Tip of the Month - Free Cloud Watch Monitoring

AWS has a great monitoring service called Cloud Watch.  Cloud Watch includes basic monitoring on your infrastructure at no additional charge.  Below you can see a graph of CPU utilization across a few of our running instances:

If you add name tags to your EC2 instances Cloud Watch can be a great tool to quickly understand what your servers are doing and if you need to address any load issues or application issues.

Here is a graph of our disk IO on our mounted server storage (EBS):

The other benefits to Cloud Watch is that you can set alarms at specific thresholds (these do cost money) to trigger a notification or event based on something happening to your AWS infrastructure (e.g. CPU spike at 100% for over 2 mins).

We find that most of our clients have an existing monitoring system in place that they want to continue to use, and we integrate these into AWS.  Cloud Watch is helpful for the proof of concept, but it is also the only monitoring solution for AWS specific infrastructure (ELB, Simple DB, etc.) and can be a helpful tool in ensuring your application is running as desired.

-KB