Learning Objectives: - Leverage CloudWatch Agent to easily monitor VM health in a unified way - Combine utilization, performance, and alarms to build operational dashboard - Understand how RackSpace is leveraging CloudWatch Agent to manage AWS resources

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Bob Wilkinson, GM – Amazon CloudWatch
Jon Madison, Manager, Product Engineering – Rackspace
May 21, 2018
AWS Online Tech Talks
Gaining Better Observability of Your VMs
with Amazon CloudWatch

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Speakers
Bob Wilkinson – AWS
GM, Amazon CloudWatch
Jon Madison – Rackspace
Manager, Product Engineering

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Agenda
• Introduction to Amazon CloudWatch
• Monitoring & Observability
• CloudWatch Agent in Action
• Rackspace – Scaling Operations with CloudWatch
• Closing

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Introduction to Amazon
CloudWatch

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Amazon CloudWatch at a Glance
MONITOR
• Get metrics on key
resources
• Observe application
and operational
health
• Monitor custom
metrics and log files
ACT
• SNS notifications
• Automated alarm
actions
• Event-driven
corrective actions
ANALYZE
• Visualize through
Dashboards
• 1-sec granularity
• Unified operational
view
• 15-months of data
retention
Gain System-Wide Visibility into Resource Utilization, Application
Performance, and Operational Health
>

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“Amazon CloudWatch monitors more than
800 trillion metric observations, triggers
than 2 trillion events, and ingests more
than 50 petabytes of logs per month (*as
of March 2018)”

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Monitoring & Observability

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From Monitoring to Observability
MONITORING
• Reports overall system health
OBSERVABILITY
• Granular insights into system
behavior
• Detailed metrics, enhanced
monitoring with alerting,
visualization, and log
aggregation & analytics
• Used for debugging, complex
troubleshooting, system
performance etc.

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Observability is Challenging
• Complex applications & microservices
• Agile infrastructure
• Distributed systems
• Disparate tooling
• High customer expectations

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+
Contextual Resource
Information
Custom Dimensions
Autodetect Region
Aggregate Metrics
1-Second Resolution
Metrics Available with the CloudWatch Agent
Metric
Enhancements
Observability Needs Granular Metrics
+
Default Metrics
CPU Disk Memory
cpu_time_guest disk_free mem_active
cpu_time_guest_nice disk_inodes_free mem_available
cpu_time_idle disk_inodes_total mem_available_percent
cpu_time_iowait disk_inodes_used mem_buffered
cpu_time_irq disk_total mem_cached
cpu_time_nice disk_used mem_free
cpu_time_softirq disk_used_percent mem_inactive
cpu_time_steal diskio_io_time mem_total
cpu_time_system diskio_iops_in_progress mem_used
cpu_time_user diskio_read_bytes mem_used_percent
cpu_usage_guest diskio_read_time
cpu_usage_guest_nice diskio_reads Network Statistics
cpu_usage_idle diskio_write_bytes netstat_tcp_close
cpu_usage_iowait diskio_write_time netstat_tcp_close_wait
cpu_usage_irq diskio_writes netstat_tcp_closing
cpu_usage_nice netstat_tcp_established
cpu_usage_softirq Processes netstat_tcp_fin_wait1
cpu_usage_steal processes_blocked netstat_tcp_fin_wait2
cpu_usage_system processes_dead netstat_tcp_last_ack
cpu_usage_user processes_idle netstat_tcp_listen
processes_paging netstat_tcp_none
Network processes_running netstat_tcp_syn_recv
net_bytes_recv processes_sleeping netstat_tcp_syn_sent
net_bytes_sent processes_stopped netstat_tcp_time_wait
net_drop_in processes_total netstat_udp_socket
net_drop_out processes_total_threads
net_err_in processes_wait Swap
net_err_out processes_zombies swap_free
net_packets_recv swap_used
net_packets_sent swap_used_percent
EC2 Instance Metrics
CPUUtilization
DiskReadBytes
DiskReadOps
DiskWriteBytes
DiskWriteOps
NetworkIn
NetworkOut
NetworkPacketsIn
NetworkPacketsOut

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CloudWatch Agent in Action

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The CloudWatch Agent Simplifies Observability
Unified Agent
Metrics & logs
For EC2 and on-premise
servers
Linux & Windows
Enhanced Metrics &
Logs
Collect in-guest system
metrics
Appends EC2
dimensions
Custom dimensions

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Getting Started Experience
Install and Configure
with AWS Systems
Manager Integration
Provides defaults
specific to OS-type
(Windows vs Linux)
Basic, Standard, or
Advanced options
(complement EC2 or
granular per resource
metrics)
Log collection
(can specify multiple
file_paths)
Migrate from
previous CW Logs
agent
Curated metric set
specific to
environment

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Ideal Path to Gain Observability of your VMs
Install the
CloudWatch
Agent
Collect
Metrics and
Logs
Build and
View
Dashboards
Create
Alarms &
Actions
Generate
New Time
Series
Using
Metric Math
✅

15. Collect
Metrics and
Logs

16. Collect
Metrics and
Logs

17. Build and
View
Dashboards

18. Create
Alarms &
Actions

19. Generate
New Time
Series Using
Metric Math

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Rackspace – Scaling Operations
with Amazon CloudWatch

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About Rackspace
• AWS Premier Consulting Partner and audited Managed
Service Provider (MSP)
• A leader in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Public
Cloud Infrastructure Managed Service Providers,
Worldwide
• Managed Service Provider to over half the Fortune 100
• Provides a full-stack portfolio, from managed operations
and applications to security, professional services, and
Enterprise migration and transformation

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Key Use Cases Driving Customer Value
1. Solving Enterprise challenges of cost optimization and
cost governance
2. Supporting day-to-day Customer Operations
3. Enabling automation to lower time to diagnose and
resolve infrastructure and Operating System issues

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1. Cost Control With Amazon CloudWatch
• Rackspace provides services for Cost and Performance Optimization
• CloudWatch replaces expensive, on premise infrastructure monitoring
• The CloudWatch Agent provides on-instance insight for disk size,
memory/swap utilization, etc.
• Rackspace recently saved a customer ~$500k on their yearly AWS
Spend by:
• Right-sizing instances based on CloudWatch metric performance insights
• Consolidating unused instances
• Migration to new instance families
• Proposed Reserved Instance (RI) savings would add ~$100k in savings
• Rackspace also has tooling to manage spend alerting, bill consolidation and
cost allocation / chargeback

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2. Scale Operations With Amazon CloudWatch
• Rackspace provides services for 24x7x365 Fanatical
Support
• CloudWatch is used to provide infrastructure monitoring and
alerting for hundreds of AWS customer accounts.
• Rackspace acts as first line of response for Infrastructure and
Operating System alarms.
• The CloudWatch Agent enables monitoring of Operating System
performance and logs, and dashboards increase context for our
operations team.

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3. Automation With Amazon CloudWatch
• CloudWatch and the CloudWatch Agent integrate with
other Amazon services (SNS, Lambda, etc.) to provide
automation opportunities
• Examples:
• Low disk space reports
• Restart runaway processes
• Run diagnostic tools in response to instance metric alarms (top,
free, etc.)

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Recommended Best Practices
• Use the in-instance visibility of the CloudWatch Agent to
maximize your cost optimization strategy
• Leverage CloudWatch Agent and Dashboards to provide
an increase in context for Operations and reduce MTTR
• CloudWatch can tie into other systems to increase
automated handling and diagnosis of issues

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Closing

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Closing Thoughts
1. Have a strong monitoring & observability strategy
2. Focus on collecting health and behavior metrics
3. Improve performance, minimize production impacts and
control costs for a better end-user experience

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Next Steps
Get started with CloudWatch for free today
aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch
Many applications can operate within our monthly free tier limits
• Basic monitoring
• 10 custom or detailed metrics
• 10 alarms
• 3 dashboards of 50 metrics each
• 1 million API requests
Install the CloudWatch Agent
docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/Install-CloudWatch-Agent
Use Metric Math to create new time series
docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/using-metric-math