AWS Monitoring
AWS Monitoring with Centreon: Comprehensive Visibility and Cost Control for Your Cloud Infrastructure.
OVERVIEW
AWS Monitoring Challenges
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the most widely adopted public cloud platform, used by companies of all sizes for its Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions. The extensive services offered by AWS—ranging from compute, database, storage, content delivery, AI, and more—empower organizations to build applications with increased flexibility, scalability, and reliability.
However, managing the wide array of services and resources available within AWS comes with its challenges. Visibility into every layer of the infrastructure is essential to efficiently diagnose performance issues, optimize resource usage, and maintain cost-effectiveness.Given the critical nature of cloud-based applications and infrastructure, monitoring system-level AWS metrics is essential. Monitoring isn’t just about performance; it’s about ensuring the operational health of applications, preventing downtime, and optimizing cloud resource costs. Monitoring can reveal trends in resource usage, security vulnerabilities, and even potential inefficiencies in infrastructure design.
Understanding AWS’s Built-in Monitoring and Shared Responsibility Model
While AWS provides user-friendly built-in monitoring tools (e.g., CloudWatch, CloudTrail), these tools are limited in scope if not integrated into a broader monitoring strategy. AWS’s Shared Responsibility Model emphasizes that AWS is responsible for security “of” the cloud, while the customer is responsible for security “in” the cloud. In this model:
- AWS secures the infrastructure, physical data centers, and networking.
- Customers are responsible for securing their applications, data, and access controls.
With this division of responsibility in mind, AWS users should not solely rely on AWS’s tools for complete visibility and monitoring. Instead, they should complement these with independent, third-party monitoring tools that provide flexibility and deeper insights into their infrastructure. This becomes particularly important when businesses undergo “lift and shift” migrations, where they move from on-premise to the cloud without rebuilding their entire infrastructure from scratch.
Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Challenges in Monitoring
Most organizations don’t operate cloud-only infrastructures; instead, they adopt hybrid or multi-cloud environments, mixing on-premise systems with AWS or other cloud providers (like Azure or Google Cloud). This introduces new complexities, including:
- Avoiding data silos: Data silos occur when different cloud environments or on-premise systems are monitored separately, making troubleshooting difficult.
- End-to-end visibility: Without a unified monitoring solution, teams might struggle to get a complete picture of performance across different environments, leading to troubleshooting silos and inefficiencies.
Cost management is another key factor. Cloud services can be expensive if not implemented and monitored correctly. Choosing a cost-effective monitoring solution that avoids vendor lock-in can help businesses retain flexibility if they decide to switch cloud providers in the future.
HOW WE HELP
How Centreon Enhances AWS Monitoring
Centreon provides a robust and comprehensive solution that helps organizations monitor not only AWS cloud services but also the broader hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructure, all in one place.
Automated AWS Monitoring for Simplified Cloud Management
Centreon’s AWS monitoring is driven by out-of-the-box AWS connectors that seamlessly integrate with the AWS API, simplifying the process of discovering, monitoring, and managing your cloud infrastructure. With Centreon, you can:
- Automatically discover your AWS resources, including instances, databases, and other critical cloud components.
- Set up standard monitoring policies that apply to AWS services, ensuring consistent monitoring across all environments.
- Gain access to rich data visualization tools, helping you track real-time performance across AWS services.
- Trigger alerts and automated actions when certain conditions or thresholds are met, ensuring proactive incident management.
- Analyze historical performance with built-in reporting tools, helping you identify trends and potential improvements over time.
- Stream AWS data into third-party APIs or databases for additional analysis or storage.
By leveraging AWS-specific connectors, Centreon provides native support for popular AWS services, including EC2, S3, CloudFront, API Gateway, RDS, Lambda, and many others. The AWS CloudWatch connector collects detailed metrics for all AWS services, ensuring no aspect of your cloud environment goes unmonitored.
Key AWS Metrics and Services Monitored by Centreon
Centreon captures and monitors a wide range of AWS metrics, ensuring your AWS environment is fully covered:
- Compute Resources (EC2, Lambda): Track CPU, memory, and disk utilization to ensure your instances and services are performing as expected.
- Network Traffic (VPC, API Gateway, CloudFront): Monitor network activity and traffic patterns to detect potential bottlenecks or security risks.
- Storage (S3, EBS, EFS): Measure storage utilization and health, helping you manage AWS costs and ensure data is safely stored and accessible.
- Databases (RDS, DynamoDB): Analyze database performance metrics to ensure optimal performance and availability of your data.
Additionally, Centreon’s CloudWatch Logs and AWS Health Event monitoring allows you to track system logs and detect unusual events or behaviors that might indicate performance degradation or security vulnerabilities.
Multi-source Monitoring Across Hybrid Environments
Beyond AWS, Centreon excels at monitoring hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Whether you’re managing on-premise data centers, private clouds, or other public cloud providers, Centreon provides a unified platform to monitor all resources from a single dashboard.
Centreon’s multi-source monitoring capabilities offer various data collection methods, depending on your infrastructure’s nature and access requirements:
- API-based monitoring: Collect performance metrics directly from AWS through its API.
- Agentless monitoring: Use application APIs (such as SSH) to monitor instances and applications without installing additional software.
- Agent-based monitoring: Deploy Centreon agents on Amazon EC2 compute instances to gather more granular metrics, such as memory utilization and disk I/O.
Real-time Dashboards and Alerts for Proactive Monitoring
Once AWS metrics are flowing into Centreon, users can leverage customizable dashboards and application maps to visualize real-time data. These tools help operational teams identify potential performance issues and security risks before they cause major incidents. Key features include:
- Service weather maps: Visualize the health of AWS services and applications at a glance, allowing teams to quickly assess operational status.
- Business activity diagrams: Monitor key dependencies between AWS services, on-premise systems, and multi-cloud architectures. This provides crucial insights into how data flows between systems and enables you to detect bottlenecks or inefficiencies.
Centreon also offers robust alerting features, ensuring your team is notified the moment something goes wrong. Alerts can be configured to trigger based on predefined thresholds, resource usage patterns, or event logs. Notifications can be sent via email or integrated with incident response tools like PagerDuty, allowing teams to take immediate action.
CENTREON BENEFITS
Centreon Benefits for AWS Monitoring
Automated Configuration
Centreon Auto-Discovery feature can be programmed to automatically discover your AWS resources. These resources can either be only listed for review, or the platform can be automatically configured for their monitoring.
Multi-Cloud Monitoring
Centreon provides a unified platform to monitor all resources from a single dashboard, whether you’re managing on-premise data centers, private clouds, or other public cloud providers.
SLA Management
Centreon links business processes to IT infrastructure, giving you a complete picture of digital performance. IT availability is continuously calculated and tracked against SLAs, visible in dashboards so that business and IT KPIs are always in sync.
More from Centreon
Ready to see how Centreon can transform your business?
Keep informed on our latest news