Ultimate AWS Monitoring and Management Cheat Sheet

Keeping track of your Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment is important for good performance, security, and cost savings. This cheat sheet will help you learn about tools and tips to manage your AWS setup better, in particular with respect to AWS Monitoring and Management.

Key Points: AWS Monitoring Basics

Important AWS Monitoring Tools

1. Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch is the main tool for AWS monitoring. It collects and tracks data, watches log files, sets alarms, and can automatically respond to changes in your AWS resources. CloudWatch shows you a complete view of your AWS resources, apps, and services running on AWS and your own servers. With CloudWatch, you can:

• Watch how your applications and infrastructure are performing in real-time
• Make custom dashboards to see important information quickly
• Set up alarms to tell you about possible problems
• Make things happen automatically when certain conditions are met

2. AWS CloudTrail

AWS CloudTrail is important for keeping things secure and following rules. It records all the actions taken in your AWS account and saves them in a special folder. This tool is useful for:

• Seeing what users are doing and how they’re using AWS
• Finding out if someone is trying to access things they shouldn’t
• Showing that you’re following the rules your company or the government set
• Figuring out security problems and fixing them
• Keeping a record of everything that happens in your AWS account

3. AWS Config

AWS Config shows you exactly how your AWS resources are set up. It keeps watching and recording any changes to your AWS resource settings, letting you:

• Check and evaluate how your AWS resources are set up
• Make it easier to check if you’re following rules and staying secure
• See how your resource settings change over time
• Keep a list of all your AWS resources
• Automatically check if your current settings match what you want them to be

4. AWS Trusted Advisor

AWS Trusted Advisor is like having a cloud expert on your team. It looks at your AWS setup and gives you tips to make it better. Trusted Advisor focuses on saving money, improving performance, making things more secure, and preventing problems. It helps by:

• Giving you real-time advice on how to set up your resources following AWS best practices
• Suggesting ways to improve your AWS setup
• Finding resources you’re not using much to help you save money
• Giving security tips to make your AWS environment safer

Good Ways to Monitor AWS Resources

1. Setting Up Good Alarms and Notifications

Make CloudWatch alarms to watch important things and take action when something goes wrong. Use Amazon SNS to send messages to your team when there are problems. Good practices include:

• Setting the right alarm levels based on past data and what your business needs
• Using different ways to send important alerts (like email, text messages, or Slack)
• Having a plan for what to do if an alarm isn’t fixed quickly
• Regularly checking and changing your alarm settings as your work changes

2. Using Tags the Right Way

Create a good system for tagging your AWS resources. This helps you organize things, control who can access what, and manage your resources better. Think about:

• Making a standard way of tagging across your whole organization
• Using tags to show what environment something is in (like production, testing, or development)
• Using tags for specific projects or applications to group resources easily
• Using tags to track costs for different parts of your business or different projects

3. Using Dashboards to See Important Information Quickly

Make custom CloudWatch dashboards to see key information about your AWS environment’s health and performance at a glance. Good dashboard strategies include:

• Grouping related information together so it’s easier to understand
• Using the right type of chart for the data you’re showing
• Making different dashboards for different roles in your organization
• Updating your dashboards regularly as your setup and priorities change

4. Making Monitoring Tasks Happen Automatically

Make routine monitoring tasks happen automatically using AWS Lambda functions and CloudWatch Events. This saves time and makes sure monitoring is done consistently. Think about automating:

• Checks on resource health and actions to fix problems
• Looking at logs and finding unusual things
• Checking if you’re following rules and making reports
• Tasks to save money, like turning off resources that aren’t being used

Important Things to Monitor for Performance

1. EC2 Instance Monitoring

Watch important things about your EC2 instances like how much CPU they’re using, network traffic, and disk activity to make sure they’re working well and to find any problems. Important things to watch include:

• CPU Usage: See how the CPU is being used and find instances that might need to be made bigger or smaller
• Network In/Out: Watch how much data is moving in and out to make the network work better
• Disk Read/Write Operations: Find applications that are doing a lot of disk activity and potential storage bottlenecks
• Memory Usage: Use custom measurements to watch memory usage and prevent out-of-memory errors

2. EBS Volume Performance Tracking

Keep an eye on EBS volume metrics like read/write speeds and how much data is moving through to make storage work better for your applications. Important things to consider:

• Watching IOPS to make sure you’re not going over your limits
• Checking how many operations are waiting to be done to find potential slowdowns
• Looking at burst balance for gp2 volumes to make them work better
• Regularly checking and changing EBS volume types based on what your applications need

3. RDS Database Monitoring

Watch important RDS metrics like CPU usage, free storage space, and database connections to keep your databases healthy and working well. Focus on:

• Watching how queries perform and finding slow queries
• Keeping track of how many connections there are to make sure you’re not reaching limits
• Watching read and write speeds to make the database work better
• Looking at how storage is being used over time to plan for future needs

4. Elastic Load Balancer Metrics

Watch ELB metrics like how many requests are coming in, how long they take, and how many healthy servers there are to make sure traffic is spread out well and your application is always available. Key metrics include:

• Request Count: Watch traffic patterns and spot possible attacks
• Latency: Check response times to make sure users have a good experience
• Surge Queue Length: Find times when there’s a lot of traffic that might need more servers
• HTTP Error Codes: Keep track of application and server errors to maintain good service

Security Monitoring and Following Rules

1. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Best Practices

Regularly check IAM policies, roles, and user permissions to make sure people only have access to what they need and to prevent unauthorized access. Good practices include:

• Using multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all IAM users
• Regularly changing access keys and passwords
• Using IAM roles for EC2 instances instead of storing login information on the instances
• Having a process to regularly check and remove unused IAM resources

2. VPC Flow Logs Analysis

Turn on and look at VPC Flow Logs to watch network traffic patterns and find possible security threats. This helps with:

• Spotting unusual traffic patterns that might mean there’s a security problem
• Fixing network connection problems
• Watching traffic between VPCs and on-premises networks
• Making sure you’re following network security rules

3. AWS Security Hub Integration

Use AWS Security Hub to bring together security findings from different AWS services and other tools, giving you a complete view of your security status. Key features include:

• A central place to see security alerts and check if you’re following rules
• Automatic security checks against industry standards and best practices
• Working together with other AWS security services like GuardDuty and Inspector
• Custom security actions and workflows you can set up

4. Compliance Reporting with AWS Config Rules

Use AWS Config Rules to constantly check if your AWS resources are following predefined rules and industry standards. Benefits include:

• Automatic checks to see if you’re following internal policies and external regulations
• Real-time notifications if something’s not following the rules
• Keeping track of how resources were set up in the past for audits
• Working with AWS Organizations to manage compliance across multiple accounts

Monitoring to Save Money

1. Using AWS Cost Explorer

Regularly use AWS Cost Explorer to look at your spending patterns, find out what’s costing the most, and predict future expenses. Important features to use include:

• Detailed breakdowns of costs by service, region, and tag
• Predicting costs based on how you’ve used AWS in the past
• Recommendations for savings plans and reserved instances
• Custom reports for specific cost analysis needs

2. Finding and Removing Unused Resources

Use AWS Trusted Advisor and custom scripts to find and remove resources that aren’t being used or are being used very little, to reduce unnecessary costs. Focus on:

• Finding and turning off EC2 instances that aren’t doing anything
• Deleting EBS volumes that aren’t attached to anything and Elastic IPs that aren’t being used
• Cleaning up old snapshots and AMIs
• Removing load balancers and NAT gateways that aren’t being used

3. Right-sizing Instances and Services

Look at CloudWatch metrics to find opportunities to adjust the size of EC2 instances and other services, making sure you’re not paying for more than you need. Consider:

• Using AWS Compute Optimizer for EC2 instance recommendations
• Looking at how much the database is being used to choose the right RDS instance sizes
• Choosing the best EBS volume types based on how they’re being used
• Adjusting Auto Scaling group settings based on actual usage patterns

4. Using Savings Plans and Reserved Instances

Use Savings Plans and Reserved Instances for workloads that you can predict to save a lot of money compared to On-Demand pricing. Good practices include:

• Looking at past usage to figure out how much to commit to
• Combining Savings Plans with Reserved Instances to save the most money
• Regularly checking and adjusting commitments based on changing workloads
• Setting up a way to share and transfer Reserved Instances across accounts

Advanced Monitoring Techniques

1. Custom Metrics with CloudWatch

Create custom CloudWatch metrics to watch specific data points that are important for your business. Examples include:

• Tracking business KPIs like how many transactions happen or how much money is made
• Watching specific performance indicators for your application
• Creating metrics that combine multiple data points
• Setting up custom health checks for complex systems

2. Log Analysis with CloudWatch Logs Insights

Use CloudWatch Logs Insights to search through your log data quickly, helping you solve problems and gain insights. Key features include:

• A powerful way to search through logs
• Showing search results in charts or graphs
• Ability to save and share searches across your organization
• Working with CloudWatch dashboards for ongoing monitoring

3. Distributed Tracing with AWS X-Ray

Use AWS X-Ray to trace requests across distributed applications, especially for microservices, to find performance bottlenecks and errors. Benefits include:

• Tracing requests from start to finish across distributed systems
• Seeing service maps to understand how your application is built
• Analyzing performance of individual parts within a distributed application
• Working with other AWS services for complete monitoring

4. Containerized Application Monitoring

Monitor containerized applications using Amazon ECS and EKS-specific metrics to ensure your containerized workloads perform well. Focus on:

• Watching how much of the cluster is being used and how resources are allocated
• Tracking container-level metrics like CPU and memory usage
• Analyzing how containers are deployed and scaled
• Setting up custom metrics for application-specific monitoring in containerized environments

AWS Monitoring and Management Command Cheat Sheet

Service	Command	Description	Status
CloudWatch	aws cloudwatch get-metric-statistics	Retrieve metric statistics	Active
CloudTrail	aws cloudtrail lookup-events	Search for events in CloudTrail	Active
AWS Config	aws configservice get-compliance-details-by-resource	Get compliance details for a resource	Active
IAM	aws iam list-users	List IAM users in the account	Active
EC2	aws ec2 describe-instances	List details of EC2 instances	Active
RDS	aws rds describe-db-instances	List details of RDS instances	Active
S3	aws s3 ls	List S3 buckets	Active
Lambda	aws lambda list-functions	List Lambda functions	Active

Conclusion: Mastering AWS Monitoring and Management

Good monitoring and management of your AWS environment are important for keeping things running well, staying secure, and saving money. By using the tools and tips in this cheat sheet, you’ll be ready to handle the challenges of running things in the cloud and make sure your AWS setup works smoothly and efficiently.

Remember to keep checking and improving your monitoring plan as your AWS environment changes. Stay up-to-date with new AWS services and features to get the most out of your cloud investment. Regularly compare your monitoring practices to AWS Well-Architected Framework principles to keep your cloud environment strong and working well.

To get even better at AWS and boost your career, think about getting AWS certifications. These show that you’re good at cloud technologies and can help you find new job opportunities in the fast-growing field of cloud computing. AWS certifications prove you can design, set up, and manage complex cloud systems, making you valuable to any company using AWS services.