Cloud computing offers several advantages over legacy on-premises systems, including cost, scalability, and performance.
Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers over 200 cloud services that can integrate seamlessly with your existing workflows, making it one of the most popular public cloud platforms.
AWS strives to make its tools easy to use, but managing resources and services can be challenging. AWS environments require continuous monitoring, for example, to determine which changes to make to reduce costs, improve performance, and secure your systems.
Here's where AWS monitoring tools, services, and best practices can help.
In this AWS monitoring guide, you'll learn what monitoring in AWS is, some must-do best practices, and the best AWS monitoring tools to use today.
Table Of Contents
What Is AWS Monitoring?
AWS monitoring involves continually observing, inspecting, and tracking the progress and quality of various AWS resources over time. It involves monitoring the AWS cloud’s dynamic environment in real-time to catch cost, security, performance, and other types of anomalies before they become a problem.
Continuous monitoring is one driver of the AWS Well-Architected framework for building an efficient and secure public cloud.
Why Monitor AWS Resources?
The primary goal of monitoring AWS is to ensure your infrastructure and applications work as expected at all times. Monitoring AWS is beneficial for several reasons:
- Check that your AWS public cloud meets the demands of your workload. Among the aspects you can monitor are your infrastructure configuration, application performance, regulatory compliance, and events.
- Easily manage your AWS services by tracking their health in a single platform.
- Detect anomalies in performance, security, and operational excellence.
- Collect, analyze, and implement data-backed insights that have solid business value.
- Maintain regulatory compliance in a cloud environment.
- Trigger automatic actions to correct abnormal situations before they get out of control or affect customer experiences.
- Monitor hybrid clouds and on-premises environments integrated with your AWS public cloud.
- Track the impact of scaling and other engineering decisions on your AWS budget to avoid overspending.
Ultimately, monitoring your AWS environments can help you find out what you need to improve to maximize ROI, performance, and costs.
Credit: The AWS Shared Responsibility Model, where AWS handles some responsibilities, such as updates and performance optimization while you manage other responsibilities, such as additional application and data security.
What Should Engineering Teams Monitor in AWS?
The AWS platform offers many services that you should and can monitor.
Credit: Dynatrace
To avoid overwhelm, you can follow the AWS Well-Architected Framework pillars to understand the right metrics to monitor. For pointers, those pillars include measuring metrics, logs, and traces to help optimize:
- Performance efficiency
- Security posture
- Cost optimization
- Reliability
- Operational excellence
In the following image, you can see some examples of key AWS performance metrics, such as CPU and memory utilization data:
Credit: Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights on AWS console
Based on those guiding principles, here are some resources your engineers should monitor on AWS.
- Unit costs - AWS EC2 instance costs, usage coverage, monthly growth KPIs, daily estimated cost, and Amazon S3 costs by storage class.
- Status check - Reveals detailed information about issues that could affect each of your EC2 instances.
- CPU utilization - This refers to the percentage of allocated compute units you consume. It can help you determine when a CPU is under- or over-utilized, revealing if it’s a bottleneck to performance.
- Memory utilization - Measures memory usage across different AWS services. For example, consistently high memory usage may be a sign that you may need to scale up your memory allocation to improve performance.
- Disk utilization - Helps you determine if the disk volume on your node’s storage capacity is sufficient for your workloads.
- Latency - It refers to the time it takes for a cloud provider to respond to a request from a customer. If you experience high latency, issues with network connectivity, web server dependencies, and backend servers may be the cause. Your application's performance could suffer and your AWS costs may increase, as a result.
- Swap usage - Describes the disk capacity devoted to holding data that should be in memory. High swap usage degrades application performance, defeating the goal of in-memory caching. Monitor it to prevent that from happening.
- AWS Cost Anomaly Detection - Helps monitor unusual spend in real-time so you can minimize surprise costs.
- Security-related metrics - Some examples of potential security issues may include:
- Multiple instances that start and stop programmatically
- Temporary security credentials that have long lives
- Activity that erases CloudTrail logs
- A new user account that deletes multiple users
You can also use custom metrics for items not covered by native AWS monitoring tools. For example, CloudWatch does not display default memory utilization metrics. However, it supports additional AWS monitoring scripts for that.
Scripts let you report a combination of various metrics, such as memory used/available/utilization, disk used/available/utilization, and swap space used/utilization.
10 AWS Monitoring Best Practices To Apply Right Away
Now that you know what AWS monitoring metrics to watch, here are some key AWS monitoring best practices to help you mitigate risk and maintain optimal performance in the public cloud.
1. Define monitoring goals and set priorities
Identify the most important AWS components to monitor according to your business goals. Your plan will need to define:
- What resources to monitor and why
- Who in your organization will monitor your AWS cloud resources
- Which AWS accounts and to monitor
- Any regulatory compliance you need to monitor
- What monitoring tools to use instead of legacy agents
- Metrics you want to monitor in AWS
- The steps to follow if something goes wrong
Developing a clear monitoring plan helps your engineers to have the information they need to make the right decisions as needed.
2. Monitor everything you possibly can
Let nothing slip by. It is essential to have complete visibility into your AWS environment. The more data you collect from all of your AWS services, the easier it will be to detect, troubleshoot, and debug issues before they become costly failures.
How do you do that? This next best practice will make it easier for you.
3. Start off with native AWS monitoring tools
Get started monitoring your AWS cloud by activating native AWS services like CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and VPC Flow Logs. This will give you time and space to digest how various data flows in and out of your AWS environments. Afterwards, you can adopt more advanced tools to measure far more detailed AWS metrics, like cost per customer or cost per feature.
4. Automate, automate, automate
Monitoring your AWS environment manually can be time-consuming, error-prone, and easy to overlook crucial metrics. Instead, you want to automate AWS monitoring to tools that do it programmatically with minimal errors.
5. Resolve issues before they become major problems
Most organizations set up AWS monitoring but cannot follow up when they should be continuously doing so. Don't forget that your AWS environment is continuously changing, and you don't want those changes to adversely affect customer experience or application performance when you can prevent it.
6. Add owner tags to instances
Tagging the users who create instances in your organization will increase accountability. One way to accomplish this is to write a Lambda script that attaches owner tags to all instances. The script will have the instance creator’s value as IAM user-name and the key as owner.
In the event of an incident, the setup will create a notification with the following details:
- Owner tag
- Name tag
- Resource ID
- Launch time
- Resource name
In addition, you can configure the setup to collect other metrics as well. For example, you can create a Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed (RACI) Matrix to determine who is responsible for what and what requires troubleshooting.
7. Monitor Costs
Companies that treat cost as a first-class metric are more likely to optimize their AWS cloud costs than those that don't. Monitoring costs proactively also promotes a cost-conscious culture, which encourages engineers to develop cost-saving solutions without compromising system performance.
Unless you monitor your AWS costs, you run the risk of receiving unexpected bills every billing cycle. Instead, consider using an AWS cost monitoring tool to track how your engineering choices lead to cloud waste so you can change that.
8. Map AWS monitoring metrics to people, products, and processes
Link metrics generated from your AWS environment to the people, products, and processes that generate them. This will help you pinpoint exactly who, what, or why you are experiencing performance, cost, or other issues.
The result? By identifying root causes quickly, you can reduce the time to respond, to repair, and to optimize your AWS operations. In addition, you can work with those involved to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.
The tools section below shares some useful services that will help you achieve this level of granularity in AWS.
9. Continuously monitor AWS resources
Monitoring in AWS isn't something you want to set up once and then forget about. Instead, you’ll want to continually monitor what recent changes are occurring in your AWS public cloud, and how they are affecting, among other things, customer experiences and cloud costs.
For example, monitoring Amazon EC2 instances continuously can help you determine whether Auto-Scaling boosts performance at peak usage to boost performance, and whether it scales down during off-peak periods to lower costs.
10. Capture logs
Logging refers to recording, tracking, and storing data about events and messages that occur in an operating system or between components and users in a system to support application availability. It also shows how state transformations affect app performance. Capturing logs can help monitor compliance with regulations and troubleshoot performance issues.
CloudWatch and CloudTrail both let you capture and report logs for further analyses. You can, however, use a log analysis tool like Loggly by SolarWinds if you want more robust search and aggregation capabilities.
Now, speaking of tools.
What Are The Best AWS Monitoring Tools Right Now?
You can monitor your AWS resources natively or through third-party tools. By automating monitoring, you can save time, money, and effort that your team would otherwise spend doing it manually.
The best AWS monitoring tools leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) models to monitor any app or stack, at any scale, and from any location. They also provide visual and well-organized dashboards to help you visualize, analyze, and understand your AWS stack without feeling overwhelmed.
The following tools can help engineers and FinOps teams gain greater visibility into their AWS cloud.
1. CloudZero - Best for cloud cost monitoring and optimization
CloudZero is a cloud cost intelligence platform that empowers you to see exactly who and what drives your cloud costs and why. With CloudZero, you can view costs across all your services in real-time, including tagged, untagged, and untaggable resources.
Using CloudZero's real-time cost anomaly detection and alerts, your engineers can prevent budget overruns before they happen. By tracking if their cloud bill increases or decreases per deployment or development project, they can experiment and build cloud systems without worrying about overspending.
You can also set up CloudZero in your AWS account to automatically allocate and monitor workloads you orchestrate in Kubernetes.
CloudZero breaks down Kubernetes/container costs to the workload level. Besides:
- CloudZero Budgets enable you to track your AWS spend against a budget and perform cost allocations with confidence.
- CloudZero’s Discount Optimization Dashboard, together with partners, ProsperOps and Xosphere, empowers you to take full advantage of AWS discounting programs to save on your commitments.
- CloudZero AnyCost helps you aggregate, monitor, and understand cloud costs across AWS, Azure, and GCP in a single platform.
Want to see CloudZero in action? 
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2. Amazon CloudWatch - Native AWS monitoring service
Amazon CloudWatch enables you to monitor and manage your AWS, on-premises, and hybrid cloud applications and architecture. CloudWatch is Amazon's default observability service for developers, DevOps engineers, IT managers, and site reliability engineers (SREs).
It does this by collecting, visualizing, and reporting metrics, logs, and events from services, applications, and other resources running on the AWS platform and on-premises servers.
CloudWatch lets you monitor anomalous behavior, understand metrics and logs side-by-side, set alarms, troubleshoot issues, and take automated actions without disrupting your workflow.
3. Amazon CloudTrail - Native AWS monitoring tool
CloudTrail helps you track API calls and user activity across your AWS infrastructure. That includes actions that a user, role, or an AWS service takes. CloudTrail records the activity as events.
Examples of CloudTrail Events include actions taken via the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, AWS Command-Line Interface, and APIs.
Some CloudTrail uses include recording policy changes on Amazon S3 storage, providing audit reports for compliance management, revealing state changes in EC2 instances, and identifying changes to Identity and Access Management users and groups.
4. AWS Security Hub - AWS security monitoring tool
This AWS native service provides a central place for aggregating security alerts and data from the entire range of AWS security services and apps. The AWS Security Hub can, for example, pull insights from AWS GuardDuty, Amazon Macie, and Amazon Inspector, inspect them, and automatically report any suspicious behavior.
Then you can use a custom dashboard to prioritize and organize the issues you find.
5. DataDog - AWS/Azure hybrid cloud monitoring
DataDog might be an ideal option if you are looking for a tracking tool that monitors AWS and Azure all in a single place. It can monitor servers, apps, metrics, clouds, and even teams across full DevOps stacks. DataDog can also monitor security, network, performance, and real users, as well as incidents in your AWS or hybrid environment.
6. Amazon Inspector - AWS vulnerabilities management
With AWS Inspector, you get a native AWS tool to help you detect, prioritize, and automate vulnerability management at any scale. The tool does this by ingesting and analyzing data continuously from over 50 sources and scanning your workloads continually.
Also, Amazon Inspector scans support compliance standards and best practices for industry standards, such as PCI DSS and NIST CSF.
7. SolarWinds AppOptics - All-in-one AWS monitoring platform
AppOptics by SolarWinds is a solid performance monitoring solution for applications and infrastructure. With AppOptics, you get continuous visibility into your serverless, host, and container environments.
The software can also monitor Windows, Linux, .NET, Kubernetes, and IIS performance. In addition, SolarWinds provides database and server monitoring tools for AWS customers.
8. Paessler PRTG - Network monitoring
With PRTG Network Monitor, you can monitor any device, system, app, or traffic across all your IT infrastructure. You can also monitor your local network and all cloud services from anywhere, determine how much bandwidth the apps are using, and identify sources of bottlenecks.
It can integrate with a variety of monitoring technologies and comes with great visuals to boost productivity.
9. Opviews - Business service monitoring on AWS
ITRS Groups’s Opsview monitors apps, operating systems, virtual machines, databases, and even containers in AWS and Azure deployments. For AWS specifically, Opsview helps monitor eight AWS services, including Amazon EC2, Amazon ELB, and Amazon S3 resources.
Also, Opsview offers over 4,500 plugins that you can integrate to increase your AWS monitoring scope and depth.
10. Dynatrace - Cloud-native and hybrid cloud monitoring service
Dynatrace is a real-time, hybrid cloud monitoring platform with built-in support for multiple AWS services. With Dynatrace OneAgent, you get to use byte-code instrumentation for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), AWS Lambda, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and AWS Fargate.
Besides metrics, traces, and logs, Dynatrace also captures user experience data and tracks microservices, networks, infrastructure, application, and security indicators for full, end-to-end AWS visibility.
11. Sematext - Enterprise AWS monitoring platform
Sematext provides an all-in-one monitoring service for AWS customers. It includes tools to monitor your AWS infrastructure, applications, network, containers, database, and user activity.
It also combines metrics on your website’s user activity, process data, and events in one place for thorough analysis without leaving the Sematext platform.
If you employ a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy, Sematext Enterprise will let you monitor both your cloud and on-premises infrastructure seamlessly.
12. AppDynamics - Application performance monitoring for AWS users
Cisco’s AppDynamics is a full-stack observability platform that you can deploy for your AWS environment, on-premises, or both. It provides real-time insights into the components that influence your application’s performance.
The goal is to help you pinpoint the root cause of application problems in real-time, down to the code level, so you can swiftly resolve them to maintain optimal customer experience.
13. Sumo Logic - AWS observability and security solution
Sumo Logic offers deep AWS integration and real-time monitoring to help you improve visibility across services like such as EC2, ECS, RDS, ElastiCache, API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, Application ELB and Network ELB.
The platform’s Root Cause Explorer enables you to identify the root cause of application issues, so you can fix it quickly and reduce your Minimum Time To Resolve (MTTR).
14. Motadata - Monitoring solution for ServiceOps
While Motadata provides real-time AWS cloud insights (metrics, logs, and traces), it may be more ideal for users looking for a platform that also provides business process monitoring.
For example, the tool automates patch management, offers ServiceOps, and provides an AI-powered conversational tool to identify root causes of network, infrastructure, and application issues.
15. EG Innovations AWS Monitoring - Cloud, SaaS, or on-premises monitoring tool
With EG Innovations' monitoring service, you can choose a SaaS, cloud-native, or the on-premises option.
The tool’s AWS monitoring platform can also be useful to you if you need a SaaS solution, on-premises tool, or to unify monitoring across a hybrid cloud setup (AWS and Azure).
In addition, it provides right-sizing and optimization to help you manage your AWS resource consumption.
What Next: Break Down Your AWS Cloud Bill Into Granular, Actionable Insights
You can completely transform the way you do business on the public cloud by using the right AWS monitoring tool. It can empower you to catch cost anomalies, allocate AWS costs fully, and with greater confidence, instead of holding your breath to see what comes up at the end of every billing cycle.
Tools and more tools won't solve what you can do on your own. To lay a solid foundation for the automation, you’ll want to first implement the AWS monitoring best practices we’ve covered here.
This AWS monitoring checklist is not exhaustive. But if you use these best practices and tools, your will be able to prevent minor issues from becoming big, costly problems real fast.
CloudZero Can Help
CloudZero enables engineers to understand how their architectural choices impact cloud costs, and finance to understand per-customer costs.
CloudZero’s cloud cost intelligence approach helps you collect, monitor, and understand your unit economics, with granular, actionable intel like cost per customer, per project, per feature, per product, and per environment.
You can also map your AWS costs to the people, products, and processes that generate those costs for simpler chargeback, showback, cost allocations, and forecasting. No tagging required.
CloudZero monitors cost-related metrics, traces, and events in real-time and alerts engineering and FinOps teams so they can address any issue before they cost thousands of dollars.
to learn how CloudZero helps you make smarter decisions, like pricing your products profitably, knowing which customer segments to target, and increasing your margins to attract investors.
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