Operational readiness

A successful approach to operations is critical to the success of every organization and its digital transformation. Operational excellence is required to ensure that your transformation achieves its purpose and that applications consistently meet their business outcomes and the expectations of their users. This topic is intended to help you get a head start on your operations.

Managing your resources

Use an orchestration tool to manage, configure, patch, and use automation.

AWS Systems Manager: Use AWS Systems Manager Quick Setup to quickly configure required security roles and commonly used Systems Manager capabilities on your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances across your entire organization.

The following are some of the capabilities of Systems Manager:

• AWS Systems Manager Session Manager allows you to SSH to Linux or RDP to Windows instances without the need to open inbound ports, maintain bastion hosts, or manage SSH keys.

• AWS Systems Manager Distributor allows you to package and publish your own software or to find and publish AWS-provided agent software packages, such as AmazonCloudWatchAgent, or third-party packages such as Trend Micro.

• AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager allows you to automate the process of patching managed nodes with both security-related updates and other types of updates.

Monitoring and observability

Implement observability in infrastructure and applications so that you can understand their state and make data-driven decisions based on business requirements.

• Amazon CloudWatch Metrics: Centralize performance data with basic monitoring metrics at no charge from AWS services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). For more information, see AWS services that publish CloudWatch metrics in the Amazon CloudWatch User Guide.

• CloudWatch Dashboards: To learn how to see key metrics from all AWS services, refer to See the pre-built cross-service dashboard . To learn how to use automatic dashboards to focus on metrics and alarms in a single AWS service, refer to See a pre-built dashboard for a single AWS service . The metrics that are considered most important by service teams are used on automatic dashboards. Use these metrics as a starting point for your own dashboards.

• CloudWatch Logs: To learn how to centralize, manage, and analyze logs from AWS services, see Enabling logging from AWS services in the Amazon CloudWatch Logs User Guide.

• CloudWatch Alarms: A metric alarm watches a single CloudWatch metric or the result of a math expression based on CloudWatch metrics. The alarm performs one or more actions based on the value of the metric or expression relative to a threshold over a number of time periods. To learn how to create and use alarms, see Using Amazon CloudWatch alarms .

• CloudWatch Agent: Install the CloudWatch agent as part of AWS Systems Manager Quick Setup to send instance metrics and logs to CloudWatch. Use these metrics and logs alongside AWS service metrics and logs to create dashboards and alarms for your infrastructure and applications.

• AWS CloudTrail: CloudTrail is active in your AWS account when you create it and doesn't require any manual setup. When activity occurs in your AWS account, that activity is recorded in a CloudTrail event. Tutorial: Review AWS account activity in event history

Set up a monitoring account for cross-account observability. To learn how, see Link monitoring accounts with source accounts in the Amazon CloudWatch User Guide.

Security and compliance

Ensuring the security and compliance of your AWS environment is paramount.

• AWS Security Hub: Security Hub provides you with a comprehensive view of your security state in AWS and helps you assess your AWS environment against security industry standards and best practices. To learn how to set it up and use it, see Enabling Security Hub in the AWS Security Hub User Guide.

• AWS Config: AWS Config provides a detailed view of the configuration of AWS resources in your AWS account. This includes how the resources are related to one another and how they were configured in the past so that you can see how the configurations and relationships change over time. Use AWS Config to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources. To learn how to set it up, see Getting Started with AWS Config in the AWS Config Developer Guide.

Video: Back to Basics: Using AWS Config; and Conformance Packs to Optimize Your AWS Resources

Backup

AWS Backup is a fully-managed service that helps you centralize and automate data protection across AWS services, in the cloud, and on premises. To learn more, see Getting started with AWS Backup in the AWS Backup Developer Guide.

Optimization and cost management

Optimize your AWS usage to ensure cost efficiency without compromising on performance and security.

• AWS Cost Explorer: This is a tool that you can use to visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time. To learn how to enable it and use it, see Analyzing your costs with AWS Cost Explorer in the AWS Cost Management User Guide.

• AWS Trusted Advisor: Trusted Advisor draws upon best practices learned from helping hundreds of thousands of AWS customers. It inspects your AWS environment, and then makes recommendations when opportunities exist to save money, improve system availability and performance, or help close security gaps. For more information, see AWS Trusted Advisor in the AWS Support User Guide.

• AWS Compute Optimizer: This is a service that analyzes the configuration of your AWS resources and their utilization metrics to provide you with right-sizing recommendations. Use Compute Optimizer to right-size workloads according to your workload preferences through artificial intelligence and machine-learning-based analytics to reduce costs by up to 25%. By using memory metrics collected by the CloudWatch agent, the recommendations for right-sizing EC2 instances are improved. For more information, see Getting started with AWS Compute Optimizer.