Day 6: Monitoring and Troubleshooting Your Website with AWS CloudWatch

Recap of Day 5

Yesterday, we successfully configured Route 53 to map the custom domain, www.limitlessao.com, to the CloudFront distribution. This made the LimitlessAO Power Solutions website accessible via a user-friendly and secure domain name. Today, we’ll focus on monitoring the website’s performance and diagnosing potential issues using AWS CloudWatch. CloudWatch provides insightful metrics, logs, and alarms to help ensure the website is always up and running.

Why Use AWS CloudWatch?

AWS CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service that provides real-time insights into your infrastructure and application performance. For the LimitlessAO website, CloudWatch will allow us to:

• Monitor key metrics like latency, error rates, and data transfer.
• Set up alarms for unusual traffic or performance issues.
• Review logs to diagnose and resolve issues proactively.

Step-by-Step Implementation

Step 1: Enable CloudFront Metrics in CloudWatch
CloudFront integrates seamlessly with CloudWatch to provide detailed metrics. To enable these metrics:

• Navigate to the CloudFront Console.
• Select your CloudFront distribution from the list.
• Click on the Telemetry tab, then scroll down to the Monitoring section.
• Click Manage additional metrics to enable more detailed or real-time metrics.
• Select the metrics you wish to enable (e.g., request count, error rates, cache statistics).
• Save your changes to apply the settings.
• For additional guidance, refer to the AWS documentation on CloudFront Monitoring.

Step 2: View Metrics in CloudWatch

• Navigate to the CloudWatch Console.
• Go to Metrics and select CloudFront under the available namespaces.
• Review important metrics such as:
• Requests: Total number of HTTP/HTTPS requests.
• 4xx/5xx Errors: Client and server error rates.
• Cache Hit Ratio: Percentage of requests served from CloudFront cache.
• Latency: Time taken to serve requests.

Step 3: Set Up Alarms for Key Metrics

• To be notified of potential issues, set up CloudWatch Alarms:
• In the CloudWatch Console, go to Alarms and click Create Alarm.
• Select a metric (e.g., 5xxErrorRate) and set a threshold.
• Example: Trigger an alarm if the 5xx error rate exceeds 5% for 5 minutes.
• Configure an action:
• Send a notification via SNS (Simple Notification Service) to your email.
• Review and create the alarm. For further guidance: Creating CloudWatch Alarms.

Step 4: Analyze Logs for Troubleshooting

• CloudFront logs can provide detailed information about requests and errors
• In the CloudFront Console, go to your distribution and enable Access Logs.
• Specify an S3 bucket to store the logs.
• Use CloudWatch Logs Insights for deeper analysis:
• Navigate to CloudWatch Logs and query the logs to identify anomalies. For more information: Analyzing CloudFront Logs.

Step 5: Monitor S3 Metrics

• Go to the S3 Console.
• Under the Metrics tab for your bucket, monitor:
• Number of Requests: Traffic to the bucket.
• Data Transfer Out: Bandwidth usage.
• First Byte Latency: Speed of responses.
• You can also set alarms for these metrics in CloudWatch.

"Monitoring is not just about detecting issues; it’s about ensuring uninterrupted excellence."

What’s Next?

With CloudWatch configured, you now have a robust monitoring system to track your website’s performance and resolve potential issues. Tomorrow, in our final post, we’ll discuss potential problems that might arise during migration, their mitigation strategies, and analyze the cost of running this architecture on AWS.

Stay tuned!
LimitlessAO