Monitoring and logging in DynamoDB
Monitoring is an important part of maintaining the reliability, availability, and performance of DynamoDB and your AWS solutions. You should collect monitoring data from all parts of your AWS solutions so you can easily debug a multi-point failure.
Topics
Monitoring plan
Before you start monitoring DynamoDB, create a monitoring plan that includes answers to the following questions:
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What are your monitoring goals?
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What resources will you monitor?
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How often will you monitor these resources?
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What monitoring tools will you use?
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Who will perform the monitoring tasks?
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Who should be notified when something goes wrong?
Performance baseline
Establish a baseline for normal DynamoDB performance in your environment, by measuring performance at various times and under different load conditions. As you monitor DynamoDB, you should consider storing historical monitoring data. This stored data will give you a baseline from which to compare current performance data, identify normal performance patterns and performance anomalies, and devise methods to address issues. To establish a baseline you should, at a minimum, monitor the following items:
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The number of read or write capacity units consumed over the specified time period, so you can track how much of your provisioned throughput is used.
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Requests that exceeded a table's provisioned write or read capacity during the specified time period, so you can determine which requests exceed the provisioned throughput quotas of a table.
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System errors, so you can determine if any requests resulted in an error.
Integrated services
DynamoDB automatically monitors your tables on your behalf and reports metrics through Amazon CloudWatch. Additionally, DynamoDB integrates with the following AWS services to help you monitor and troubleshoot your DynamoDB resources.
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AWS CloudTrail captures API calls and related events made by or on behalf of your AWS account and delivers the log files to an Amazon S3 bucket that you specify. For more information, see Logging DynamoDB operations by using AWS CloudTrail.
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Contributor Insights is a diagnostic tool for identifying the most frequently accessed and throttled keys in your table or index at a glance. For more information, see Analyzing data access using CloudWatch contributor insights for DynamoDB.
Automated monitoring tools
AWS provides various tools that you can use to monitor DynamoDB. We recommend that you automate monitoring tasks as much as possible. You can use the following automated monitoring tools to watch DynamoDB and report when something is wrong:
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AWS CloudTrail alarms – Watch a single metric over a time period that 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. AWS CloudTrail alarms do 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 Monitoring metrics in DynamoDB with Amazon CloudWatch.
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AWS CloudTrail log monitoring – Share log files between accounts, monitor AWS CloudTrail log files in real time by sending them to AWS CloudTrail Logs, write log processing applications in Java, and validate that your log files haven't changed after delivery by AWS CloudTrail. For more information, see What is Amazon CloudWatch Logs in the AWS CloudTrail User Guide.
