21 Days of AWS using Terraform — Day 7- Introduction to CloudWatch using Terraform

Welcome to Day 7 of 21 Days of AWS using Terraform. Topic for today is Introduction to CloudWatch using terraform.

What is CloudWatch?

AWS CloudWatch is a monitoring service to monitor AWS resources, as well as the applications that run on AWS.

As per official documentation

Amazon CloudWatch monitors your Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources and the applications you run on AWS in real time. You can use CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, which are variables you can measure for your resources and applications.

Reference

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/WhatIsCloudWatch.html

EC2/Host Level Metrics that CloudWatch monitors by default consist of

• CPU
• Network
• Disk

• Status Check

There are two types of status check

• System status check: Monitor the AWS System on which your instance runs. It either requires AWS involvement to repair or you can fix it by yourself by just stop/start the instance(in case of EBS volumes).Examples of problems that can cause system status checks to fail

* Loss of network connectivity
* Loss of system power
* Software issues on the physical host
* Hardware issues on the physical host that impact network reachability

• Instance status check: Monitor the software and network configuration of an individual instance. It checks/detects problems that require your involvement to repair.

* Incorrect networking or startup configuration
* Exhausted memory
* Corrupted filesystem
* Incompatible kernel

NOTE

• Memory/RAM utilization is custom metrics.
• By default, EC2 monitoring is 5 minutes intervals but we can always enable detailed monitoring(1 minutes interval, but that will cost you some extra $$$)

Reference

https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/pricing/

P.S: CloudWatch can be used on premise too. We just need to install the SSM(System Manager) and CloudWatch agent.

Enough of the theoretical concept, let setup first CloudWatch alarm

• Scenario1: We want to create a CloudWatch alarm that sends an email using SNS notification when CPU Utilization is more than 70%

• Setup a CPU Usage Alarm using the AWS Management Console
• Open the CloudWatch console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/.
• In the navigation pane, choose Alarms, Create Alarm.
• Go to Metric → Select metric → EC2 → Per-Instance-Metrics → CPU Utilization → Select metric

To read the complete blog

21 Days of AWS using Terraform - Day 7- Introduction to CloudWatch using Terraform

• Looking forward for you guys to join this journey
• Website: http://100daysofdevops.com/
• Twitter: @100daysofdevops OR @lakhera2015
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/795382630808645/
• Medium: https://medium.com/@devopslearning
• GitHub: https://github.com/100daysofdevops/100daysofdevops
• Slack: https://join.slack.com/t/100daysofdevops/shared_invite/enQtNzg1MjUzMzQzMzgxLWM4Yjk0ZWJiMjY4ZWE3ODBjZjgyYTllZmUxNzFkNTgxZjQ4NDlmZjkzODAwNDczOTYwOTM2MzlhZDNkM2FkMDA
• YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/laprashant/videos?view_as=subscriber

In addition to that, I am going to host 5 meetups whose aim is to build the below architecture.

• Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/100daysofdevops
• Day1(Nov 10): Introduction to Terraform https://www.meetup.com/100daysofdevops/events/266192294/
• Day 2(Nov 16): Building VPC using Terraform
• Day 3(Nov 17): Creating EC2 Instance inside this VPC using Terraform
• Day 4(Nov 23): Adding Application Load Balancer and Auto-Scaling to the EC2 instance created on Day 3
• Day5(Nov 24): Add Backend MySQL Database and CloudWatch Alarm using Terraform