How to Use CloudWatch to Monitor DB Performance

CloudWatch is a component of Amazon Web Service (AWS) used for monitoring services of AWS cloud resources and clients’ applications running on AWS infrastructure. CloudWatch is a ready-made tool that you can hook into most monitoring tools. It enables real-time monitoring of resources on AWS such as Aurora, RDS, EC2 instances, and EBS. CloudWatch automatically provides you with metrics such as CPU utilization, latency and request counts. It can be used to monitor logs files and set alarms as it automatically reacts to changes in your AWS resources.

Monitoring your instances with CloudWatch

CloudWatch provides an easy way to monitor your instances by collecting and processing raw data from Amazon EC2 into readable, near-real-time metrics. It allows visibilityof statics recorded up to a period of 15 months, gwhich provides a better perspective on your Web applications and service performance. You can receive metrics from Amazon EC2 and have them listed on your CloudWatch through:

• An API
• Command-Line tools
• AWS SDK
• AWS Management Console

Features and benefits of CloudWatch

These are the features and the benefits of CloudWatch:

1.    Basic Monitoring — Basic Monitoring of your EC2 instances at no additional cost.
2.    Elastic Load Balancer Health Checks — Detects unhealthy instances and instructs Auto Scaling to automatically replace instances that have been deemed unhealthy by an Elastic Load Balancer.
3.    Alarms — Monitor CloudWatch metrics and notifies you when the metrics fall outside the configured range. Multiple Alarms can also be attached to an individual metric and each set to have multiple actions.
4.    Auto Scaling Suspend/Resume — Stop activated triggers thus preventing scaling activities from being initiated.
5.    Auto Scaling Follow the Line — Schedule scaling operations actions to be performed at particular points in time, creating a time-based scaling plan.
6.    Auto Scaling Policies — Gaincontrol over the size of your AutoScaling groups.

Integrating the metrics with CloudWatch

One of the shortcomings of CloudWatch is that you’re limited to the already-configured metrics, and you must be able to integrate with what’s available. Otherwise, if you don’t want to integrate, then you will be limited to the set thresholds from CloudWatch and will be able to just get the alerts straight from CloudWatch.

Conclusion

Amazon CloudWatch is a great tool for monitoring services, and Datavail has the expertise and knowledge to comfortably set up, configure and fine-tune CloudWatch together with other services that you would need to integrate and monitor.

If you would like more information on how to use CloudWatch to monitor database performance, please contact Datavail today. Datavail is a specialized IT services company focused on Data Management with solutions in BI/DW, analytics, database administration, custom application development, and enterprise applications. We provide both professional and managed services delivered via our global delivery model, focused on Microsoft, Oracle and other leading technologies.