CloudWatch Monitoring and Notifications - amazon-web-services

I am using various AWS services (Lambda, Glue, S3, Redshift, EC2) for ETL processing. I am trying to create a 'log ETL flow' to have monitoring and notifications sent out (email or otherwise) when a step fails in the process.
I have checked that each service I am using has metrics being logged in CloudWatch. I am now trying to figure out a smart way of processing this data in order to send out notifications when a step fails and/or have a central monitoring of the entire flow.
Are there any best practices or examples of this setup?

It seems to be the perfect case for the CloudWatch Alarms.
You can create a CloudWatch alarm that watches a single CloudWatch metric or the result of a math expression based on CloudWatch metrics. The alarm performs one or more actions based on the value of the metric or expression relative to a threshold over a number of time periods. The action can be an Amazon EC2 action, an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling action, or a notification sent to an Amazon SNS topic.
You can create a chain CloudWatch Alarm -> SNS
You can either use SNS to notify users via SMS or Push Notifications.
Or you can do one step more SNS -> SES to deliver emails.

Related

monitor SQS queue with CloudWatch

Hope you all doing well, I am new with SQS and Cloudwatch and I need to create a Cloudwatch that would monitor SQS and would trigger Lambda with an event every time a message enters and every time a message is left.
On another note, the lambda function should scale up and down ASG service. So if anyone has a cookbook regarding those issues it would be very helpful
thank you so much!
It appears that your requirement is to scale Amazon EC2 instances when messages are waiting to be processed in an Amazon SQS queue.
The correct architecture for this would be to configure the Auto Scaling group to use a scaling policy based on the metric ApproximateNumberOfMessagesVisible. This is a metric that Amazon SQS queues send to Amazon CloudWatch Metrics. There is no need to use an AWS Lambda function.
For reference, see:
Scaling based on Amazon SQS - Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
Rapid Auto Scaling with Amazon SQS | AWS News Blog

Difference between AWS CloudWatch and AWS CloudWatch Events

Was studying about Amazon web services and fundamentals when came across these 2 concepts:
Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch Events
Even while going through the official documents on AWS, I couldn't find a difference between the two even when Amazon mentions that they are different. Excerpt is:
CloudWatch provides you with data and actionable insights to monitor
your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes,
optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational
health. CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the
form of logs, metrics, and events, providing you with a unified view
of AWS resources, applications, and services that run on AWS and
on-premises servers. You can use CloudWatch to detect anomalous behavior in your environments, set alarms, visualize logs and metrics side by side, take automated actions, troubleshoot issues, and discover insights to keep your applications
running smoothly.
Documentation of AWS CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch Events delivers a near real-time stream of system
events that describe changes in Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources.
Using simple rules that you can quickly set up, you can match events
and route them to one or more target functions or streams. CloudWatch
Events becomes aware of operational changes as they occur. CloudWatch
Events responds to these operational changes and takes corrective
action as necessary, by sending messages to respond to the
environment, activating functions, making changes, and capturing
state information.
Documentation of AWS CloudWatch Events
CloudWatch
CloudWatch is a monitoring service for your AWS resources. You can log your log files. By default the resources created within AWS logs in CloudWatch(CW). You can monitor the performance of resources too for example you can monitor how is the CPU utilisation of your EC2 instances. You can set Alarms for your resources
threshold and get an SNS alert on that. For example you can create an Alarm for your DynamoDB if Write capacity is exceeding. You can set an alarm for your billing too. So basically CW is used as a Monitoring solution.
CloudWatch Events
CW Events is also the part of CloudWatch. CloudWatch Events is helpful when you want to schedule something. Say you to want run your lambda every other day, you can create a Rule for that or you want to trigger your lambda by Event Pattern. There are bunch of services supported by CloudWatch Events, you can use anyone of them as your target not just Lambda. Event Buses is used to send your events to multiple accounts also. For example if you have a CICD account and every month you bake new AMI there, to notify all accounts you can use Event Buses, after getting the event from Event Buses other accounts can trigger some important tasks.

AWS CloudWatch Rule triggered by Log Event

I want to create CloudWatch Rule that would be triggered upon creation of Log Event. For that reason as an event pattern I selected CloudWatch Logs service but when I try to generate some Cloud Watch logs the rule is not getting triggered. I can not find any example of using aws.logs as a source for an event and hence my question if I'm doing something wrong.
This is because the only events for logs available are AWS API Call via CloudTrail. CloudWatch Logs does not generate CloudWatch events on receiving new log entries.
For the Logs API call events to work, you need to setup CloudTrial trial.
However, if you want to trigger your lambda function based on log entries, I can recommend using subscription filters for lambda:
You can use subscriptions to get access to a real-time feed of log events from CloudWatch Logs and have it delivered to other services such as a Amazon Kinesis stream, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose stream, or AWS Lambda for custom processing, analysis, or loading to other systems.

Count AWS IoT successfull connection

I want to count number of successful IoT connection and messages at a time , based upon that I want to apply a notification if it increases by some threshold.
I could not see any cloudwatch matrices/event for the same.
Please guide
You have a couple options. You can create a topic rule that listens on lifecycle topics. The rule could push a custom metric into AWS Cloudwatch or invoke a lambda that has more complex logic.
Another option would be to turn on the IOT logs, and setup a Lambda subscription to the IoT log group. The Lambda function could then push a custom metric into AWS CloudWatch.

AWS EC2 Alarm that triggers when log in

Is it possible to create a CloudWatch alarm that triggers when my EC2 instance is accessed from a remote location (using SSH login with key pairs, for example)?
There is no in-built capability to perform an action when users login to an Amazon EC2 instance. You would have to write a script that activates when users login, checks the situation and then triggers a notification.
Amazon CloudWatch alarms trigger when a metric exceeds a pre-determined value. Therefore, you would need to do the following:
Have your custom script detect the situation and then publish a custom metric to CloudWatch
Create an Alarm in CloudWatch that triggers when the metric exceeds your desired value (for example, when it is greater than zero)
Configure your alarm to respond as desired (eg send a notification via SNS)
If you just wish to receive a notification when the user logs-in, you could bypass CloudWatch and just have your script publish a message to the SNS (Simple Notification Service) topic directly. It would have the same result.