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Monitoring AWS

AWS is one of the most effective, uniform and reliable platforms in the cloud market. However even the best of the networks requires regular monitoring and updates to ensure that it’s safe and running optimally. The general guidelines in this post will point you in the right direction.

Using a combination of tools provided by Amazon, such as GuardDuty, CloudTrail and CloudWatch, and open source tools such as Cloud Custodian et al a comprehensive operations and security monitoring and management tool can be created. GuardDuty helps prevent unusual activities on the account and its resources. Cloud Custodian is great for mapping resources and monitoring various parameters based on predefined policies.

A few challenges we have seen with the “cloud” due to its ease of usage are:

Resources are spun up and not shut down when not required
Server snapshots are taken but not removed when required
Server sizing is done taking the largest use case but not optimized later

Using the monitoring and management tools along with some analytical ability add-on allows managers to:

Visually map the environment and the utilization levels of all the resources
View the billing impact
Monitor utilization
Monitor threat vectors

This allows them to take informed decision and optimize the AWS infrastructure leading to optimal cost management and a relatively secure environment.