What are the Best Practices for AWS Monitoring for a Business Enterprise?

Amazon Web Services is a subsidiary of Amazon Company that is known to provide on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to the individuals, companies, and government agencies. In this blog, we will talk about the measures which you can take to enhance the monitoring and security of the AWS Cloud infrastructure. Monitoring is done in a Well-Architected Framework. For trustworthy AWS managed services five pillars are mentioned below:

• Security
• Reliability
• Performance Efficiency
• Operational Excellence
• Cost Optimization

Monitoring the AWS environment is an important practice as it is done through auditing and understanding of the resources. For proper security, it is important to implement proper tools and practices to get real-time details about the environments. Many reports have been found related to data and security breaches.

Several tools are available to ensure the security, but implementing them is not sufficient. There are hundreds to thousands of instances in the infrastructure. So, it becomes quite hectic to manage these instances using such tools. Some install node exporter on the target instance. But seeing a huge infrastructure having multiple instances it is difficult to install node exporter manually. That is why AWS managed cloud services implement standard practices to tackle such problems.

1. Invest in Standard Custom AMI

For instance, you are setting up a monitoring and alerting tool for your business infrastructure. You have installed node exporter and enabled service discovery in your AWS Infrastructure. All the nodes are up and enabled monitoring on infrastructure. But after a few days, you find out that a few nodes are down as someone has launched a few instances. Now it is a hectic job to install node exporter in every newly launched instance. To address such situations create an Amazon machine image (AMI) of these machines. This makes the whole task smooth and you will be able to monitor the infrastructure better.

2. Create Default Security Group

When different exporters are installed in the servers to get metrics in monitoring tool it is important to open some specific ports in the target machines to fetch metrics from servers. It is tough to inform people that if you are launching any instance. And if these ports are not open then creating a custom AMI is of no use. So, to address this issue, build a security group of all the required inbound rules. This security group can be attached to all instances with an AWS CLI command. This will automate your manual jobs, and it will monitor your infrastructure effortlessly.

3. Integrate Owner Tags

If you have a business where many people are authorized to create instances. To monitor all tasks properly write a Lambda script to integrate an owner tag to all the instances having key as owner and value as the username. Now, these tags will help to easily find the responsible person when any accident happens. The AWS managed service provider monitor set up with the notification channels like Slack and Microsoft Teams. These channels can be used for other purposes as well as send notifications in your infrastructure. These notifications include resource name, resource id, launch time, name tag, & owner tag.

4. Send Notifications

To monitor the setup monitoring tools are very important but that is not enough. It is important to monitor how the instances are being created and what all practices are being followed for complete security. For all these notifications, it is important to create a separate notification channel and push all such notifications. With the support of this, the team will have better insights regarding the whole infrastructure.

Conclusion

OrangeMantra implements best practices for the AWS monitoring to ensure the stability of the cloud infrastructure by resolving the issues according to their severity level. But successfully applying these practices needs monitoring tools configuration on a high technical level. Having deep knowledge of cloud architecture and its peculiarities our support team help to solve these challenges.