Using Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor - Amazon CloudWatch

Using Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor

Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor provides visibility into how internet issues impact the performance and availability between your applications hosted on AWS and your end users. It can reduce the time it takes for you to diagnose internet issues from days to minutes. Internet Monitor uses the connectivity data that AWS captures from its global networking footprint to calculate a baseline of performance and availability for internet-facing traffic. This is the same data that AWS uses to monitor internet uptime and availability. With those measurements as a baseline, Internet Monitor raises awareness for you when there are significant problems for your end users (clients) in the different geographic locations where your application runs.

In the Amazon CloudWatch console, you can see a global view of traffic patterns and health events, and easily drill down into information about events, at different geographic granularities (locations). You can clearly visualize impact, and pinpoint the client locations and networks (ASNs, typically internet service providers or ISPs) that are affected. If Internet Monitor determines that an internet availability or performance issue is caused by a specific ASN or by the AWS network, it provides that information.

Key features of Internet Monitor

  • Internet Monitor suggests insights and recommendations that can help you improve your end users' experience. You can explore, in near real-time, how to improve the projected latency of your application by switching to use other services, or by rerouting traffic to your workload through different AWS Regions.

  • Internet Monitor stores internet measurements for pairs of your client locations and ASNs, or city-networks. Internet Monitor also creates aggregated CloudWatch metrics for traffic to your application, and to each AWS Region and edge location. With the Internet Monitor dashboard, you can quickly identify what's impacting your application's performance and availability, so that you can track down and address issues.

  • Internet Monitor also publishes internet measurements to CloudWatch Logs and CloudWatch Metrics, to support using CloudWatch tools to explore data for city-networks that are specific to your monitored application traffic. Optionally, you can also publish internet measurements to Amazon S3.

  • Internet Monitor sends health events to Amazon EventBridge so that you can set up notifications. If an issue is caused by the AWS network, you also automatically receive an AWS Health Dashboard notification with the steps that AWS is taking to mitigate the problem.

How to use Internet Monitor

To use Internet Monitor, you create a monitor and associate your application's resources with it—VPCs, Network Load Balancers, CloudFront distributions, or WorkSpaces directories—to enable Internet Monitor to know where your application's internet-facing traffic is. Internet Monitor then publishes internet measurements from AWS that are specific to the city-networks, that is, the client locations and ASNs (typically internet service providers or ISPs), where clients access your application. For more information, see How Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor works. To begin working with Internet Monitor, see Getting started with Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor using the console.

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