Level 100: Monitoring with CloudWatch Dashboards

Authors

• Eric Pullen, Performance Efficiency Lead Well-Architected

Introduction

This hands-on lab will guide you through configuring an Amazon CloudWatch Dashboard to get aggregated views of the health and performance of all AWS resources. This enables you to quickly get started with monitoring, explore account and resource-based view of metrics and alarms, and easily drill-down to understand the root cause of performance issues. You can find more best practices by reading the Performance Efficiency Pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. The skills you learn will help you secure your workloads in alignment with the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

Goals

• Monitor resources to ensure they are performing as expected

Prerequisites

• An AWS account that you are able to use for testing, that is not used for production or other purposes.
• An IAM user or role in your AWS account. NOTE: You will be billed for any applicable AWS resources used if you complete this lab that are not covered in the AWS Free Tier.

Costs

• https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/pricing/
  • You can create 3 dashboards for up to 50 metrics per month on the free tier
  • Outside of the free tier, it is $3.00 per dashboard per month
• This lab creates one dashboard, so the maximum cost would be $3.00 per month if you have already consumed the free tier.

Steps:

• View Amazon CloudWatch Automatic Dashboards
• Teardown