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Monitoring, Alerting, and Logging

You'll want to see what's happening in your AWS account:

Metrics​

You can find all the metrics for your AWS account on the CloudWatch Metrics Page.

  • Most AWS services emit metrics by default, which you'll find under the "AWS Namespaces" (e.g. EC2, ECS, RDS).

  • Custom metrics show up under "Custom Namespaces." In particular, the cloudwatch-memory-disk-metrics-scripts module is installed on every server to emit metrics not available from AWS by default, including memory and disk usage. You'll find these under the "Linux System" Namespace.

You may want to create a Dashboard with the most useful metrics for your services and have that open on a big screen at all times.

Alerts​

A number of alerts have been configured using the alarms modules in terraform-aws-monitoring to notify you in case of problems, such as a service running out of disk space or a load balancer seeing too many 5xx errors.

That said, you probably don't want to wait for someone to check that page before realizing something is wrong, so instead, you should subscribe to alerts via email or text message. Go to the SNS Topics Page, select the cloudwatch-alarms topic, and click "Actions -> Subscribe to topic."

If you'd like alarm notifications to go to a Slack channel, check out the sns-to-slack module.

Logs​

All of your services have been configured using the cloudwatch-log-aggregation-scripts module to send their logs to CloudWatch Logs. Instead of SSHing to each server to see a log file, and worrying about losing those log files if the server fails, you can just go to the CloudWatch Logs Page and browse and search log events for all your servers in near-real-time.