Monitor Like a DevOps Pro: Build A Log Aggregation System in AWS
The hands-on lab is part of these learning paths
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Description
Lab Overview
Modern cloud environments are increasingly complex distributed systems with numerous software components. The challenge of maintaining moving parts and tracking changes in your AWS systems continues to grow but there are solutions. Some natural questions are:
- How can you understand, at a high level, what is happening in your cloud?
- Can you track usage trends over time?
- Can you debug any issues that might arise?
- Can you search through logs without combing through files on many disks?
The answer to each is yes you can! A sophisticated tool called a log aggregation system gathers operational information and logs from across your entire cloud. The log aggregation system is an advanced DevOps technique that enables you to quickly search your logs and graph any trends arising from structured logs.
In this Lab, you will create a distributed, scalable log aggregation system within AWS running on AWS Elasticsearch Service. This Log Aggregation System will ingest as much of your CloudWatch log stream events as you want, events generated from AWS EC2 Instances, Lambda functions, Databases, and anything else you want to submit log events from.
Lab Objectives
Upon completion of this Lab, you will be able to:
- Compare and contrast the log analysis capabilities in CloudWatch Logs and Elastic Stack, particularly Elasticsearch and Kibana
- Subscribe AWS Elasticsearch Service to CloudWatch to automatically stream log events to Elasticsearch
- Search and discover log events using Kibana
- Create Kibana visualizations and dashboards to monitor the state of your cloud
Lab Prerequisites
You should be familiar with:
- Basic CloudWatch concepts
- Elastic Stack experience is useful but not required
Lab Environment
Before completing the Lab instructions, the environment will look as follows:
After completing the Lab instructions, the environment should look similar to:
Updates
November 11th, 2020 - Fixed an issue preventing the creation of the ElasticSearch domain
October 1st, 2020 - Updated some instructions to make them clearer, updated some screenshots to match new UI
May 27th, 2020 - Updated a lab step's instructions to account for long Elasticsearch deployment times
October 4th, 2019 - Because of CloudFormation changes, we have updated instructions and screenshots.
May 9th, 2019 - Removed unnecessary permissions from the Lambda DynamoDB role and improved the explanation of how Lambda functions map to CloudWatch log streams
January 11th, 2019 - Fixed an issue that caused the streaming of CloudWatch Logs to ElasticSearch to fail
January 10th, 2019 - Added a validation Lab Step to check the work you perform in the Lab
June 5, 2018 - Complete update (easier to follow instructions and screenshots, update to Elastic Stack version 6)
Nothing gets me more excited than the AWS Cloud platform! Teaching cloud skills has become a passion of mine. I have been a software and AWS cloud consultant for several years. I hold all 5 possible AWS Certifications: Developer Associate, SysOps Administrator Associate, Solutions Architect Associate, Solutions Architect Professional, and DevOps Engineer Professional. I live in Austin, Texas, USA, and work as development lead at my consulting firm, Tuple Labs.