What is AWS EC2 monitoring?

Amazon offers a primary tool for AWS EC2 monitoring, CloudWatch. It is capable of detailed monitoring of EC2 sites, and in many cases it provides a set of dashboards that are good enough to be quickly put into use for detecting problems and identifying potential for optimizations. This is essentially what EC2 monitoring is all about. No matter how comprehensive and accurate AWS' own monitoring and managing of their resources is, it is necessary to add a second layer with a good CloudWatch setup or a third party Amazon EC2 monitoring solution. To avoid disruptions, outages, bottlenecks, misconfigurations, and general issues, monitoring EC2 instances is a task that should be undertaken by any sensible cloud administrator.

Using CloudWatch is the bare minimum to ensure that your cloud infrastructure is healthy and working as it should.

The capabilities of some of the features in CloudWatch are inadequate for satisfying the importance of a really comprehensive EC2 monitoring.

For instance, CloudWatch may lack some granularity that is required to cover your specific use case. Monitoring EC2 sites with a custom solution such as Checkmk can better satisfy your requirements, making the task of monitoring Amazon EC2 more worthwhile. This is especially important when you need more customizability and flexibility in the monitoring. Setting your own thresholds alternatively to the limits in CloudWatch, or defining specific monitoring configurations are all aspects that a separate monitoring tool can provide.

Furthermore, advanced features like anomaly detection, trend analysis, predictive analysis, custom alarming, and automated remediation are only some of the additional features that third party cloud monitoring tools may offer. These may not always be necessary, but certainly desirable, and can be the solution to many of the limits to functionality in CloudWatch.

Regardless of the tool of choice, monitoring EC2 instances is an important step in having a reliable, healthy, and high-performance cloud-based infrastructure. Without knowing how it is working and performing, you are blind to possible issues and disruptions. This is the primary reason for monitoring AWS EC2 sites.

For detailed EC2 monitoring, knowing the various types of site is valuable. AWS has created many types of sites, for various applications. Knowing which is which will help you in EC2 monitoring as every instance focuses on particular aspects, for instance, memory efficiency or data storage, and therefore you will also need to focus on slightly different metrics.

Thus, let’s have a concise look at the existing AWS site types, and what they specialize in.

As the name implies, general purpose sites are balanced virtual servers that can be used for a variety of tasks. These AWS site types are geared towards uses that do not require a focus on any specific resource, like computing power, efficient memory, high network throughput, or fast read/write operations. They instead provide a balanced environment that should suffice for most workloads.

Their main differences between these types of site is the CPU model, the software environment (Mac is for macOS workloads), and in how their costs are calculated.

Computing-optimized sites are AWS site types for CPU-intensive applications, such as batch processing workloads, media transcoding, high performance computing, scientific modeling, dedicated gaming servers, machine learning and more. Any type of CPU-intensive application can benefit from choosing these sites over the general purpose ones mentioned above.

If the needs of your organization include heavy memory usage applications, AWS sites that are memory-optimized are what you should consider using. These are specifically designed for memory-intensive workloads, for instance, in-memory databases, electronic design automation, financial actuarial, and of numerous types of heavy data analysis.

Most of the differences between memory optimized instances are in the type and amount of memory available. Some go up to 24Tb of memory, with multiple Gbps of network bandwidth to sustain a rapid exchange of data to and from the memory.

AWS site types for accelerated-computing are for workloads that necessitate high GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) power. Tensor core GPUs for machine learning and HPC (High Performance Computing) are the main use cases for these EC2 sites. Image and video analysis, forecasting, advanced text and document analysis, voice translation and transcription, natural language processing (NLP), deep learning training are also what these sites excel at.

AWS offers quite a few of these types of site, depending on the type of GPU and quantity of overall resources.

For applications that necessitate high, sequential read and write access to very large datasets, AWS has a series of storage-optimized EC2 sites. These are ideal for both relational and non-relational databases, and for all workloads that require very fast access to medium size data sets, such as search engines and data analytics. These sites provide fast NVMe SSD storage but cheaper, and slower, ones, with simple HDD storage, are also available.

The main difference between sites of this type is in the maximum transactions processed per second (TPS), and cost per Tb of data storage. Naturally, increasing the speed increases the cost of a site.