Monitor your Auto Scaling groups

Monitoring is an important part of maintaining the reliability, availability, and performance of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and your AWS Cloud solutions. AWS provides the following monitoring tools to watch Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, report when something is wrong, and take automatic actions when appropriate:

Health checks

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling periodically performs health checks on the instances in your Auto Scaling group. If an instance does not pass its health check, it is marked unhealthy and will be terminated while Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling launches a new instance to replace it. For more information, see Health checks for instances in an Auto Scaling group.

AWS Health Dashboard

The AWS Health Dashboard displays information, and also provides notifications that are invoked by changes in the health of AWS resources. The information is presented in two ways: on a dashboard that shows recent and upcoming events organized by category, and in a full event log that shows all events from the past 90 days. For more information, see AWS Health Dashboard notifications for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling.

CloudTrail

With AWS CloudTrail, you can track the calls made to the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling API by or on behalf of your AWS account. CloudTrail stores the information in log files in the Amazon S3 bucket that you specify. You can use these log files to monitor activity of your Auto Scaling groups. Logs include which requests were made, the source IP addresses where the requests came from, who made the request, when the request was made, and so on. For more information, see Log Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling API calls with AWS CloudTrail.

Log collection for your Amazon EC2 instances

You can use CloudWatch to collect logs from the operating systems for your EC2 instances. For more information, see Collect metrics and logs from Amazon EC2 instances and on-premises servers with the CloudWatch agent and View log data sent to CloudWatch Logs in the Amazon CloudWatch User Guide.

For information about other AWS services that can help you log and collect data about your workloads, see the Logging and monitoring guide for application owners guide in the AWS Prescriptive Guidance.

Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch helps you analyze logs and, in real time, monitor the metrics of your AWS resources and hosted applications. You can collect and track metrics, create customized dashboards, and set alarms that notify you or take actions when a specified metric reaches a threshold that you specify. For example, you can be notified when network activity is suddenly higher or lower than a metric's expected value. For more information about using this service to monitor the metrics of your Auto Scaling groups and instances, see Monitor CloudWatch metrics for your Auto Scaling groups and instances.

CloudWatch also tracks AWS API usage metrics for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling. You can use these metrics to configure alarms that alert you when your API call volume violates a threshold that you define. For more information, see AWS usage metrics in the Amazon CloudWatch User Guide.

AWS Compute Optimizer

Compute Optimizer provides Amazon EC2 instance recommendations that can help you decide whether to move to a new instance type. It analyzes whether an Auto Scaling group's instance type is optimal and generates recommendations to reduce the cost and improve the performance of your workloads. For more information, see Use AWS Compute Optimizer to get recommendations for the instance type for an Auto Scaling group.

Amazon EventBridge

Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus service that makes it easy to connect your applications with data from a variety of sources. EventBridge delivers a stream of real-time data from your own applications, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, and AWS services and routes that data to targets such as Lambda. This lets you monitor events that happen in services, and build event-driven architectures. For more information, see Use EventBridge to handle Auto Scaling events.

AWS Security Hub

Use AWS Security Hub to monitor your usage of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling as it relates to security best practices. Security Hub uses detective security controls to evaluate resource configurations and security standards to help you comply with various compliance frameworks. For more information about using Security Hub to evaluate Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling resources, see Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling controls in the AWS Security Hub User Guide.

Amazon Simple Notification Service

You can configure Auto Scaling groups to send Amazon SNS notifications when Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling launches or terminates instances. For more information, see Amazon SNS notification options for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling.