Using Amazon CloudWatch Webservice

Using Amazon Cloudwatch

Amazon AWS has launched Amazon Cloudwatch sometime back, and recently I used it for one of the projects I am working on.

Amazon Cloudwatch is a web service that provides monitoring and alerts for Amazon AWS resources.  It also provides operational metrics on Amazon EC2 resources like elastic load balancers, instances, etc. The operational metrics includes parameters like CPU Utilization, Disk read/writes, and network traffic. Please note that there is a charge to use this service.

It is very easy to setup Amazon Cloud Watch web service. Primarily, I found two uses of CloudWatch as follows:

·         Trigger email generation when a certain parameter exceeds certain value

·         Auto-scale up or down the instances when a certain parameter exceeds certain value.

The parameters mentioned in the above 2 points can be any operational metrics.

How to setup?

Here’s how to setup email generation using Amazon Cloudwatch:

Step 1:

Select parameter, in this case I have selected CPU Utilization:

Step 2:

Next step is to setup alarm and email address:

That’s it !!

The alarm is setup using Amazon CloudWatch web service. When the CPU utilization of the selected instance will cross the threshold of 5 min, an email will be sent to the email id setup.

For more information you can look at the link - http://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/