Monitor Amazon EC2 resources
Monitoring is an important part of maintaining the reliability, availability, and performance of your Amazon EC2 instances and your AWS solutions. You should collect monitoring data from all of the parts in your AWS solutions so that you can more easily debug a multi-point failure if one occurs.
AWS provides various tools that you can use to monitor Amazon EC2. The Amazon EC2 and CloudWatch console dashboards provide an at-a-glance view of the state of your Amazon EC2 environment. In addition, we provide the following:
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System status checks – Monitor the AWS systems required to use your instance to ensure that they are working properly. These checks detect problems with your instance that require AWS involvement to repair. When a system status check fails, you can choose to wait for AWS to fix the issue or you can resolve it yourself (for example, by stopping and restarting or terminating and replacing an instance). Examples of problems that cause system status checks to fail include:
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Loss of network connectivity
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Loss of system power
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Software issues on the physical host
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Hardware issues on the physical host that impact network reachability
For more information, see Status checks for Amazon EC2 instances.
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Instance status checks – Monitor the software and network configuration of your individual instance. These checks detect problems that require your involvement to repair. When an instance status check fails, typically you will need to address the problem yourself (for example, by rebooting the instance or by making modifications in your operating system). Examples of problems that may cause instance status checks to fail include:
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Failed system status checks
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Misconfigured networking or startup configuration
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Exhausted memory
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Corrupted file system
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Incompatible kernel
For more information, see Status checks for Amazon EC2 instances.
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Amazon CloudWatch alarms – Watch a single metric over a time period you specify, and perform one or more actions based on the value of the metric relative to a given threshold over a number of time periods. The action is a notification sent to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic or Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling policy. Alarms invoke actions for sustained state changes only. CloudWatch alarms will not invoke actions simply because they are in a particular state; the state must have changed and been maintained for a specified number of periods. For more information, see Monitor your instances using CloudWatch.
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Amazon EventBridge events – Automate your AWS services and respond automatically to system events. Events from AWS services are delivered to EventBridge in near real time, and you can specify automated actions to take when an event matches a rule you write. For more information, see Automate Amazon EC2 using EventBridge.
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AWS CloudTrail logs – Capture detailed information about the calls made to the Amazon EC2 API and stores them as log files in Amazon S3. You can use CloudTrail logs to determine which calls were made, the source IP address for the call, who made the call, and when the call was made. For more information, see Log Amazon EC2 API calls using AWS CloudTrail.
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CloudWatch agent – Collect logs and system-level metrics from both hosts and guests on your EC2 instances and on-premises servers. For more information, see Collecting Metrics and Logs from Amazon EC2 Instances and On-Premises Servers with the CloudWatch Agent in the Amazon CloudWatch User Guide.
