As businesses continue to migrate their applications and services to the cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become a popular choice for its scalability, reliability, and cost-effectiveness. However, with the increasing complexity of cloud environments, it has become crucial for businesses to have a robust monitoring system in place to ensure the smooth functioning of their applications. This is where AWS monitoring tools, like ManageEngine Applications Manager, come into play.
What is AWS cloud monitoring?
AWS cloud monitoring is the process of tracking and analyzing the performance and health of your AWS infrastructure, services, and applications on the cloud. It involves monitoring various health and resource usage metrics, such as CPU utilization, network traffic, disk usage, and more, to identify and resolve issues (ideally before they become major problems) and ensure optimal performance of your AWS cloud infrastructure.
Why is AWS monitoring important?
While AWS is the most sought-after cloud solution for its high availability, scalability, reliability, and ease of use, monitoring your AWS cloud deployments is crucial, especially when your infrastructure involves business-critical applications such as banking or trading, which require 24/7 tracking. In such cases, AWS cloud monitoring helps you ensure high availability and performance of your AWS cloud services and, by extension, your business applications in real time.
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Proactive issue detection: With AWS monitoring, you can proactively detect and resolve issues before they impact your business. By continuously monitoring your AWS infrastructure, you can identify and troubleshoot any performance bottlenecks, network connectivity issues, or resource constraints.
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Cost optimization: AWS offers a pay-per-use model, where businesses are charged based on their resource consumption. With AWS monitoring, you can track your resource usage and identify any underutilized or overutilized resources, allowing you to optimize your costs and save money.
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Ensure high availability: Downtime can be costly for businesses, and AWS monitoring can help prevent it. By monitoring your AWS environment, you can identify any potential failures or performance issues and take corrective actions to ensure high availability of your applications.
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Capacity planning: As your business grows, your AWS infrastructure needs to scale accordingly. AWS monitoring provides insights into your resource usage, allowing you to plan and allocate resources effectively, ensuring that your applications can handle the increasing workload.
Using Applications Manager for AWS cloud monitoring
ManageEngine Applications Manager is a comprehensive application performance monitoring solution that offers AWS monitoring capabilities. It provides end-to-end visibility into your AWS cloud environment, allowing you to monitor your cloud infrastructure, services, and applications from a single console. Here’s how Applications Manager can help with AWS cloud monitoring, categorized based on business application requirements:
Compute
Monitoring compute services in AWS is crucial for maintaining the performance, availability, and cost-effectiveness of cloud resources. With the dynamic nature of the cloud, it is essential to continuously monitor the usage and performance of compute services that are hosting your application. This allows you to identify any potential issues or bottlenecks in your infrastructure and take proactive measures to prevent downtime and optimize resource utilization.
Applications Manager monitors the performance of your AWS compute resources and helps in identifying unused or underutilized resources, reducing costs and improving overall efficiency. It provides valuable insights into the health and usage of applications running on these compute services, enabling businesses to make informed decisions and improve their overall cloud strategy. Applications Manager supports the following compute services:
Databases
Maintaining the performance, availability, and security of your AWS databases is as important as monitoring your compute services. As businesses increasingly rely on cloud-based databases, it becomes essential to continuously monitor them to ensure they are functioning optimally. Early detection of potential database issues and resolving them on time is vital to prevent possible performance outages or downtime in advance to ensure seamless operations of your business applications.
Applications Manager makes it easier to monitor AWS database services such as RDS, DynamoDB, and Aurora. It provides valuable insights into the database’s usage patterns and keeps track of critical DB metrics such as high CPU usage, storage capacity constraints, or network connectivity problems, enabling you to enhance your database performance, better allocate resources, and optimize costs. You can also get query-level insights and anomaly detection for AWS databases.
Containers
With the increasing adoption of containerization and microservices architecture, the need for monitoring container services has become important. However, as these services run in a distributed environment, keeping constant track of the performance of AWS container services is essential to ensure a smooth container orchestration and seamless application deployments.
Applications Manager helps you in proactively monitoring the performance of your AWS container services and helps in identifying potential bottlenecks, optimizing resource usage, and ensuring high availability of applications running on containers such as Docker or Kubernetes. It provides valuable insights into the overall health and performance of the containerized applications and instantly notifies you of any possible performance issues or downtime. This enables you to ensure high availability, reliability, and scalability for your containerized applications in your business infrastructure.
Container services supported in Applications Manager include:
Storage
Enterprise-level business applications deal with huge amounts of data that need to be stored and retrieved on a daily basis. With the constant evolution of technology and the ever-growing amount of data being stored in the cloud, it is crucial to keep a close eye on the AWS storage services to ensure they are functioning properly and efficiently.
With Applications Manager’s AWS cloud monitoring capabilities, you can proactively track the overall health and performance of your AWS storage services such as Amazon S3 and EFS in real time. It provides in-depth visibility into the performance of your AWS storage services along with resource allocation and usage patterns, and it helps you instantly detect intricate bottlenecks, which can help you prevent potential data loss, downtime, and other costly disruptions. This way you can take appropriate measures to optimize your storage resources, maximize efficiency, and avoid unnecessary expenses for your storage services.
Networking and content delivery
Monitoring networking services is crucial for ensuring the smooth functioning of all the application transactions hosted on the AWS platform and is responsible for routing traffic and managing the flow of data between different components of an application. Any issues or disruptions in these services can result in downtime, slow response times, and, ultimately, a negative impact on the user experience. Additionally, keeping track of your CDN resources plays a major role in efficient content delivery mechanisms for your applications based on application load.
Applications Manager makes it easier for you to track the performance of your networking services such as load balancing, messaging queues, content delivery, and more. It keeps track of KPIs and proactively identifies any potential issues, enabling you to optimize performance and ensure high availability of your application deployments. This not only helps in maintaining a reliable and efficient infrastructure but also helps in meeting service level agreements and providing a seamless experience to end users. Applications Manager supports the following networking and content delivery services:
Billing services
AWS offers a wide range of services and features, which can make it challenging to keep track of usage and costs. Without proper monitoring, businesses may overspend on services they do not need, or they may underestimate their usage and face unexpectedly high bills.
Applications Manager provides support for monitoring AWS billing to help you identify areas of inefficiency and optimize the use of resources deployed on AWS cloud to reduce costs. It helps you to plan budgets, ensuring that businesses stay within their allocated budget. By regularly monitoring AWS billing, businesses can gain better control over their expenses and make informed decisions about their cloud usage, ultimately leading to cost savings and improved financial management.
Currently, Applications Manager supports monitoring for most of the popular AWS services and will soon extend monitoring to include more services.
Monitor applications running on AWS
Alongside monitoring AWS infrastructure, you can also use Applications Manager to monitor the performance of applications running on AWS. Our application performance monitoring feature, APM Insight, offers deep insights into the business-critical transactions that are being executed within an application. It helps you understand which transactions are slow and why they are slow. You can trace the execution paths of transactions to pinpoint the root cause of performance issues. With the help of distributed transaction tracing, automated service maps, and thread profiling, developers can quickly debug applications and catch errors in production environments.
Applications Manager supports applications in Java, .NET, .NET Core, Python, PHP, Node.js, and Ruby languages.
Applications Manager also comes equipped with a robust alerting system that quickly alerts you about issues with your AWS services as well as the workloads running on them. You can receive these alerts in a channel of your choice, such as email, text, or Slack. Features such as adaptive thresholds and AI-powered alerts ensure that you know which alerts matter instead of drowning in noise.
With Applications Manager’s AI-powered reports, you can perform trend analysis, capacity planning, and effective cost management. You can publish these reports in dashboards and share them with different stakeholders in your organization for better decision-making.
Get started with AWS cloud monitoring
Applications Manager’s diverse support for AWS performance monitoring services helps ensure your AWS services are always up and running and your applications are performing efficiently. With comprehensive alerting and reporting capabilities, you can quickly troubleshoot issues and resolve performance bottlenecks before they affect end users.
If you haven’t used Applications Manager yet, you can get a 30-day, free trial and start monitoring your AWS services and workloads alongside your other infrastructure components right away.
