Using Network Synthetic Monitor
Network Synthetic Monitor provides visibility into the performance of the network connecting your AWS hosted applications to your on-premises destinations, and allows you to identify the source of any network performance degradation within minutes. Network Synthetic Monitor is fully managed by AWS. Therefore, you don't need to install additional agents to monitor your network performance. You can quickly visualize packet loss and latency of your hybrid network connections, set alerts and thresholds, and then take action to improve your end users’ network experience.
Network Synthetic Monitor is intended for network operators and application developers who want real-time insights into network performance.
Network Synthetic Monitor Key features
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Use Network Synthetic Monitor to benchmark your changing hybrid network environment with continuous real-time packet loss and latency metrics.
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When you connect by using AWS Direct Connect, Network Synthetic Monitor can help you to rapidly diagnose network degradation within the AWS network with the network health indicator (NHI), which Network Synthetic Monitor writes to your Amazon CloudWatch account. The NHI metric is a binary value, based on a probabilistic score about whether network degradation is within AWS.
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Network Synthetic Monitor provides a fully-managed agent approach to monitoring, so you don’t need to install agents either on VPCs or on-premises. To get started, you just need to specify a VPC subnet and an on-premises IP address. You can establish a private connection between your VPC and Network Synthetic Monitor resources by using AWS PrivateLink. For more information, see Using CloudWatch, CloudWatch Synthetics, and CloudWatch Network Monitoring with interface VPC endpoints.
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Network Synthetic Monitor publishes metrics to CloudWatch Metrics. You can create dashboards to view your metrics, and also create actionable thresholds and alarms on the metrics that are specific to your application.
For more information, see How Network Synthetic Monitor works.
Network Synthetic Monitor terminology and components
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Monitor — A monitor displays the resources that you can view network performance and availability measurements for, and that you want to get health event alerts about. When you create a monitor for an application, you add an AWS hosted resource as the network source. Network Synthetic Monitor then creates a list of all possible probes between the AWS hosted resource and your destination IP addresses.
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Probes — A probe is the traffic that's sent from the AWS hosted resource to your on-premises destination IP address. Network Synthetic Monitor metrics are written into your CloudWatch account for every probe that's configured in a monitor.
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AWS network source — An AWS network source is a monitor probe's originating AWS source, which is a subnet in one of your VPCs.
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Destination — A destination is the target in your on-premises network for the AWS network source. A destination is a combination of your on-premises IP addresses, network protocols, ports, and network packet size. IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are both supported.
Network Synthetic Monitor requirements and limitations
The following summarizes requirements and limitations for Network Synthetic Monitor. For specific quotas (or limits), see Network Synthetic Monitor quotas.
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Monitor subnets must be owned by the same account as the monitor.
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Network Synthetic Monitor doesn't provide automatic network failover in the event of an AWS network issue.
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There's a charge for each probe that you create. For pricing details, see Pricing for Network Synthetic Monitor.
