Troubleshooting tools

- [Instructor] We have a number of troubleshooting tools available to us to help us with our EC2 instances. For example we're going to look through this particular list and talk about the top three here in more detail coming up, AWS CloudWatch, the Trusted Advisor, and also the VPC Flow Logs. You may also be familiar with the AWS Console that you can run CLI commands and other aspects and you still have access to all of your operating system level tools, things within the operating system like Windows or Linux that you could use for troubleshooting.

CloudWatch is a service that monitors the resources and applications that you're going to use inside of AWS. There's not really any software installed for this. It gives you the ability to monitor your EC2 instances and the basic package is free which includes things like checking the CPU utilization, the disk usage and even the data transfer activity. Now for a fee, it'll even go to the extent of monitoring high resolution data points and as well as metric aggregation. CloudWatch can also monitor metrics on AWS resources such as DynamoDB, EBS, RDS, and more.

It has a lot of different features that allow you to collect the data, including log files, you can set alarms and even automatically configure changes made within your resources. The big advantage of CloudWatch is that it's going to grant some very much needed visibility into how you're using your resources. It's also going to look at things like the performance of your applications and give you really a big picture as to what the overall health is of your operations. One example inside of CloudWatch is to set things like alarms.

For example if a specific metric exceeds a limit, say disk utilization, you're running out of disk space, it could potentially notify you and take action. Another possibility could be CPU utilization like say in a web farm. It could trigger Auto Scaling to add or even take away EC2 instances. The next tool we'll talk about is Trusted Advisor. It's a tool that monitors your environment and it's going to give you really recommendations. Are you using the resources properly? If you've deployed too many EC2 instances that aren't really coming to full utilization, it can give you that information.

So whether it's security, performance, or cost, there's all sorts of information and advice that it can provide you. One particular use case is what we refer to as right sizing the virtual machine, meaning making sure that the virtual machines you deployed aren't either too big or too small. This whole process also tends to help, just in general, improve security because it's going to look at some of the best practices, even look into things like fault tolerance. Ultimately, the goal let's keep you in check with the current AWS best practices.

Now lastly we have the VPC Flow Logs. This is going to allow you to gather information about what traffic is going to and from the network interfaces inside of your VPC. It's an incredibly valuable security tool. And even from a troubleshooting point of view, it could be a must have in your arsenal of tools and it's because it's going to help you figure out if traffic was blocked so you could figure out why isn't traffic reaching my instance or maybe you've got excessive amounts of traffic hitting your instance and you're trying to figure out why.

This comes at no additional charge and is available on all the VPCs.