Key operational health tools - Amazon Web Services (AWS) Tutorial

- [Instructor] As we know, when our applications are operational, in production, or in test mode, we need to know how those applications are operating. So we need the logging and monitoring information. So we need CloudWatch, and CloudWatch stores its results in what are called logs, i.e., CloudWatch Logs. This is a centralized storage area for the systems and the applications and the services that make up your stack for your application. Specifically, the EC2 instances or containers, that logging information can be sent to CloudWatch logs, CloudTrail trails, remember trails hold all API calls that are going on in your account and the authentications to your account. And VPCs are the networks that we are utilizing. So any data that transverses our network, i.e, the packet flow at the sub-net level or the EC2 instance, or the entire network, that can be stored in CloudWatch logs, as well. Now, logs could also be directly sent to something called Kinesis. Kinesis is another AWS service that allows you to do almost realtime analysis of the information that is streaming into Kinesis. So Kinesis takes in the information, stores it and quickly starts to do an analysis. Or you might say, "I have a third party tool. "I would like to have just a log information dumped "into an S2 bucket. "I'll connect my application or utility to the S3 bucket "and do my own analysis. "Thank you very much." There's a new service, as well, called CloudWatch Log Insights and this allows you to do a more detailed query and search of your log data. In fact, you can search across multiple log data groups for any patterns or operational issues that you may be searching for. You also have a couple of dashboards at your disposal that provide information onto what's going on with the services that you're using in your design, as well. Every single service will have metrics, and there will be a monitoring tab that you can view the core information for each service that you're using, such as EC2 instances or databases or EBS volumes. Now, maybe you want to have more information than going from dashboard to dashboard. So if you have support, i.e., business or enterprise support, that you've signed up for, then you can have a customized personal health dashboard that will give you alerts and potential guidance when Amazon's having issues with services that are going to impact your application. Now, this can be pretty powerful because you could also say, "Well, the events that happen "that are monitored by CloudWatch can also be fed "into my personal health dashboard." In fact, you can also use what's called the AWS Health API to craft customized connections with third party applications that you're using. So we can do some pretty nice things to be aware as to what's going on with our applications running at AWS.