As cloud adoption accelerates, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has cemented dominance holding 33% IaaS market share – more than the next three competitors combined. With so many major organizations entrusting AWS infrastructure to run vital systems, cloud performance monitoring is no longer optional. This is where AWS Status comes in.
AWS Status provides centralized observability across the full infrastructure stack – enabling users to track health metrics, get early warnings of issues, and ensure reliability even at massive scale. In this guide, we’ll explore how it works under the hood, what intelligent capabilities Status unlocks, and how teams can activate monitoring to take command of cloud environments.
The Growing Mandate for Cloud Monitoring
As enterprise cloud spend [$__ billion in 2022] migrates from traditional data centers to AWS, system complexity explodes. Expert teams must manage resources across 20+ regions balancing performance, security and costs. Without live visibility, they’re flying blind.
42% of organizations report lacking necessary cloud monitoring capabilities despite surging investment. AWS Status finally provides the missing puzzle piece enabling governance.
How AWS Status Fits Into A Management Strategy
AWS Status gives users a monitoring “command center” to oversee cloud health across regions and accounts from one dashboard with:
- Infrastructure Monitoring – Status Checks diagnose infrastructure backend issues
- App Performance Tracking – Metrics reveal application response times, errors
- Awareness of Upstream Dependencies – Service health shows reliance points
- Operational Analytics – Historical trends enable failure analysis, planning
- Alerting for Anomalies – Thresholds provide alerts for urgent attention
- Cost/Capacity Forecasting – Metering guides optimal usage,Host sizing
Armed with this data, we can establish guardrails around cloud reliability and spending before lack of visibility causes loss of control.
Now let’s explore under the hood at how AWS executes system-wide data collection and analysis to make Status possible.
Inside AWS Status: How Metrics Are Gathered
To enable Status, AWS employs a coordinated metrics gathering pipeline across its Global Infrastructure:
Step 1 – Requests Handled by API Gateway: External client requests first flow through the Amazon API Gateway managing access authorization and routing traffic to originating services.
Step 2 – Gateway Logs Request Details: As requests pass through, the API Gateway tracks key attributes like response time, statuses returned, URLs, etc.
Step 3 – Services Track Internal Metrics: Originating services also pull detailed metrics on traffic received including utilization, faults, and backend processes supporting request handling.
Step 4 – Data Synced to Systems Manager: Metrics are seamlessly synced from Gateways, EC2 instances, Lambda functions and more to the AWS Systems Manager.
Step 5 – Metrics Analyzed Centrally: Systems Manager crunches metrics into insights on health and performance by resource.
By correlating metrics at the infrastructure and application levels, Status constructs a holistic view of operational health. Now let’s explore making sense of all that data with Status tools.
Checking Under the Hood: Types of Status Checks
To surface actionable insights, Status summarizes infrastructure metrics into status checks evaluating performance against expected baselines, including:
| Check Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Instance Checks | Diagnose system-level issues on EC2 instances like CPU contention, disk bottlenecks. |
| System Checks | Monitor AWS back-end components supporting instances like host hardware and network. |
| Volume Checks | Inspect disk throughput, IOPS and capacity for EBS volumes. |
| Service Health | Check overall availability and request error rates for front-end application services and APIs. |
Status Check results then feed an at-a-glance Health Dashboard enabling teams to quickly detect degrading performance. Checks like CPU usage make the impact of heavy loads visually clear.
Now let’s examine how Instance and System Checks provide complementary views.
Comparing System vs Instance Checks
System and Instance checks focus on separate components:
![Instance vs system status checks aws.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1675532243377/df08b3e5-7e34-4f76-999a-3e9a2073c61d.png align="center")
Instance Checks monitor from the guest OS up evaluating the application environment powering your services – like resource contention between containers on EC2 hosts.
System Checks evaluate platform components AWS manages below the OS like networking, host hardware and hypervisor Issues here can manifest as instance performance problems.
Think of it as inspecting performance from the application level and infrastructure level. Using both provides a holistic view to diagnose issues.
Now let’s walk through the anatomy of the AWS Status dashboards.
Inside AWS System Manager Dashboards
Accessed through AWS Systems Manager, AWS Status dashboards provide centralized visibility including:
Global Dashboard – Single pane of glass showing health issues and alerts from all accounts/regions.
Resource Specific Dashboards – Focus on EC2, Lambda, API Gateway and other service health.
Personal Health Dashboard – Customizable to focus visibility on key workloads and configurations.
Maintenance Tracker – Get alerts for upcoming AWS maintenance events that could impact services.
Combined, these enable broad or targeted insights based on use cases. Now let‘s get set up to activate monitoring!
Getting Started with AWS Status
Follow these steps to begin tracking resource health via AWS Status:
1. Install SSM Agent: Ensure EC2 instances, on-prem hosts have the SSM agent for surfacing metrics.
2. Set Up IAM Permissions: Apply appropriate IAM roles enabling Systems Manager API access.
3. Configure Notifications: Build Amazon SNS topics to receive alerts when thresholds are breached.
4. Create Status Dashboards: Build dashboards to track key system, application and usage metrics with alerts configured.
With those fundamentals in place, AWS Status can now provide the monitoring visibility needed to govern cloud environments.
Using The Personal Health Dashboard
For customized insights, The Personal Health Dashboard should be ground zero for most users. Key capabilities include:
Triage Issues – Dashboard rolls up health into a single view. Bad statuses stand out enabling fast triage.
Trend Analysis – Graph historical metric data like usage over weeks or months to inform planning.
Alerting – Set intelligent thresholds to be notified of anomalies as they emerge.
Diagnostics – Drill down to pinpoint root causes when alerts trigger.
Think of Personal Health like a helicopter view over your cloud domain – enabling you to spot storms brewing and steer clear well in advance.
Closing Thoughts
As AWS cloud adoption accelerates into the mainstream, the primary constraint is no longer technical know-how – it is the ability to control operational complexity that comes with scale. AWS Status finally provides the missing visibility needed to master cloud management as usage explodes across ever more mission critical systems.
Start with foundational instance and system checks, build Personal dashboards to focus monitoring on critical apps and configure intelligent alerting to get ahead of performance issues. Make status resources the cornerstone of cloud governance strategy and ensure systems avoid degradation amid meteoric growth.
Key Takeaways: Monitor cloud health proactively with AWS tools providing actionable insights from infrastructure and apps. Instrument broad observability upfront to get ahead of issues before customers notice.
