Introduction to CloudWatch

Lab Overview

In this lab you will explore CloudWatch, a monitoring service provided by AWS. CloudWatch makes it possible to monitor nearly anything, inside or outside AWS. Common usage is to monitor EC2 instances for CPU and memory utilization, ephemeral or EBS volume disk usage and throughput, as well as network statistics. CloudWatch also enables you to configure alarms, so that when thresholds are violated for specific metrics a notification and/or action is automatically triggered.

Lab Objectives

Upon completion of this lab you will be able to:

• Explain key CloudWatch concepts and default EC2 metrics
• Create and test an alarm
• Add actions to an alarm
• Install monitoring tools as EC2 User Data to send custom metrics to CloudWatch
• Navigate about in CloudWatch and explore many other possibilities for monitoring AWS resources

Lab Prerequisites

Although this is a beginner level lab, you should be familiar with:

• Using the AWS Console
• EC2 basics
• Conceptual understanding of the type of metrics typically monitored (such as CPU, storage and network resources)

Lab Environment

Before completing the lab instructions the environment will look as follows:

After completing the lab instructions the environment should look similar to: