The Best AWS Monitoring Tools: A Comprehensive Guide

To succeed in the fast-paced world of cloud computing, it is necessary to monitor your AWS infrastructure. Monitoring keeps your cloud resources secure, efficient, and functioning properly. AWS monitoring gathers data on the performance of the services in your cloud environment. You can use this information to make simple images and alerts that show you what's going on. Dashboards show how your AWS data is used, while alerts help you quickly respond to any issues.

First-Party AWS Monitoring Tools

AWS comes with a few built-in monitoring tools. Let's look.

  1. Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon Cloudwatch is an AWS tool that helps you keep track of your infrastructure, services, and apps. You can monitor data, review logs, and get alerts. CloudWatch can also help you manage resource usage, application performance, and costs. You can configure alarms for the metrics in CloudWatch. For example, you can choose to receive an alert when an EC2 instance's CPU usage goes above a certain level. This alarm can then work with other services to notify you or make changes to your application environment automatically.

  1. Cast AI

CAST AI is a platform that helps cloud-native businesses automate their Kubernetes environment and reduce cloud expenses by 65%. The platform provides complete visibility into Kubernetes security and costs, saving time by automating manual operations.

To achieve full automation, the platform includes bin packing, autoscaling, spot instance automation, free cost monitoring, and security insights. With these features, businesses can automate their Kubernetes environment, freeing their engineers to focus on more important tasks.

  1. AWS CloudTrail

Amazon CloudTrail is a tool that can help you keep track of user and API activity in your AWS environment. It records all API calls to your AWS account, including details like the time of the call, who made the call, and the source IP address. This information is important to ensure that all actions on your AWS resources are accurately recorded and easy to trace. Using CloudTrail is a simple way to monitor and manage your AWS account.

  1. AWS Config

One helpful tool for monitoring AWS resources is AWS Config, which allows you to create rules for evaluating resource configurations. You won't find any metrics or logs on the AWS Config dashboard, but you can set up rules that will be reported to you if they are violated.

  1. EC2 Dashboard

Amazon EC2 is a service in the AWS cloud that provides processing power that can adapt and scale. It offers a pricing model that is based on flexible usage. To ensure effective EC2 monitoring and the proper functioning of various services, it is important to monitor several factors, such as instances, network activity, and security.

Third-party Monitoring Tools

Third-party apps can help by analyzing our cloud resources, logs, and metrics to provide useful insights. Let’s look at the third party AWS monitoring tools:

  1. Datadog

Datadog is a tool that can help you monitor your AWS resources. It's easy to use and lets you filter and analyze logs and metrics to troubleshoot issues or collect specific data. AWS recognizes Datadog as a partner for Advanced Technologies. The website operates on a subscription basis and offers a free 14-day trial.

  1. Zabbix

Zabbix is a monitoring tool that works on any operating system. You can use Zabbix to keep track of different programs, databases, and resources.The tool has a dashboard that makes it easy to see what's happening, and a large online community can help you if you have questions.

  1. New Relic

New Relic is a monitoring service offered by AWS Advanced Technology Partner. It shows real-time information about all the activity in your AWS account. Pixie helps identify performance issues and minimizes vulnerabilities by analyzing intra-cluster communications. You can analyze performance issues and create personalized dashboards with AWS data.

  1. NetApp Cloud Insights

NetApp Cloud Insights is a tool that monitors your infrastructure both on-site and in private clouds. This report includes a comprehensive list of available resources. It also helps to identify and fix any issues that may arise. Cloud Insights includes features such as conditional alerting, optimization suggestions, predictive analytics, machine learning-based anomaly detection, and compliance audits to ensure your infrastructure runs smoothly.

  1. SolarWinds AppOptics

AppOptics is a tool that can help you track your performance statistics, capacity limits, and log trends. It works with CloudWatch to enhance the metrics collected. Integrating AppOptics with other AWS services is quick and easy. It also offers features to monitor multiple AWS accounts from one interface. AppOptics provides automatic analyses of your operations.

Conclusion

To monitor your AWS system, many tools are available, each with unique features. However, comparing them can be challenging. To effectively monitor your AWS system, it's best to try out a few different tools. You can choose the most useful and efficient for your requirements. The key is to choose the tool that's right for you. Managed AWS services provides expert management to ensure your AWS environments are secure, compliant, and optimized. You can trust them to handle everything while you focus on your business.