05. Monitoring in AWS

AWS provides robust monitoring capabilities for their services. This is vital for understanding how your systems are performing not just at the moment, but also over time. CloudWatch Metrics tracks metrics on AWS services. Any metric that AWS makes available is presented via CloudWatch. You can also create your own metrics with a "custom metric". Taking a variety of related metrics and putting them on a CloudWatch Dashboard is an effective way to gaining visibility into your system without spending a lot of time doing it. Investing in understanding what metrics are available on the services you use, what each metric means, and what your usage is are imperative to running a highly available platform.

Refer to the following for links to every AWS service that pushes metrics into CloudWatch, and what those metrics mean:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/aws-services-cloudwatch-metrics.html