Building a Dashboard

Please note: this course has been outdated and replaced with two new courses: An Overview of Amazon CloudWatch and Building CloudWatch Dashboards

CloudWatch is a monitoring service for cloud resources in the applications you run on Amazon Web Services. CloudWatch can collect metrics, set and manage alarms, and automatically react to changes in your AWS resources. Amazon Web Services Cloudwatch can monitor AWS resources such as Amazon EC2 instances, DynamoDB tables, and Amazon RDS DB instances. You can also create custom metrics generated by your applications and services and any log files your applications generate. You’ll see how we can use Amazon CloudWatch to gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance and operationally you’ll use these insights to keep applications running smoothly. This course includes a high-level overview of how to monitor EC2, monitor other Amazon resources, monitor custom metrics, monitor and store logs, set alarms, graph and view statistics, and how to monitor and react to resource changes.

Intended Audience

• Systems Admins
• Operational Support
• Solution Architects working on AWS Certification
• Anyone concerned about monitoring data or AWS recurring billing

Prerequisites

• AWS Console Login
• General knowledge of how to launch an Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance on either Linux or Windows
• View CloudWatch Documentation at https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/
• An operational EC2 (Windows/Linux)

Learning Objectives

• Monitor EC2 and other AWS resources
• Build custom metrics
• Monitor and store log information from Linux instances
• Set alarms for metrics to take action on an instance or auto-scaling group
• Create a dashboard to monitor EC2 instances
• React to load to trigger auto scaling horizontally within AWS.

This Course Includes

• Over 90 minutes of high-definition video
• Console demos

What You'll Learn

• Course Intro: What to expect from this course
• Getting Started: How to launch an EC2 instance
• Building a Dashboard: How to take the metrics from the instance and create a dashboard
• Monitoring EC2 Instances: How and why you should be monitoring the environment in Amazon Web Services
• Sending Log Files to Cloudwatch: A lesson on the importance of sending log files to Cloudwatch
• Alarms: How to specify alarms
• Course Conclusion: Course summary