Automate setting up an Amazon CloudWatch dashboard

Publication date: April 2021 (last update: October 2023)

The Application Monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch solution automates the process of setting up Amazon CloudWatch dashboards for your Apache, NGINX, and Puma workloads running on Amazon EC2. Using the solution, you can reduce the time it takes to get started with monitoring key performance metrics and logs for your web servers running on AWS. This solution provides a preconfigured dashboard, so you can analyze web traffic patterns, determine whether to scale servers up or out, and detect bottlenecks and other performance problems for the workloads.

This implementation guide provides an overview of the Application Monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch solution, its reference architecture and components, considerations for planning the deployment, configuration steps for deploying thissolution to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. The solution is intended for DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT managers who are responsible for workload and performance monitoring.

You can use this navigation table to quickly find answers to these questions:

If you want to ...	Read ...
Know the cost for running this solution.	Cost
Understand the security considerations for this solution.	Security
Know how to plan for quotas for this solution.	Quotas
Know which AWS Regions this solution supports.	Supported AWS Regions
View or download the AWS CloudFormation templates included in this solution to automatically deploy the infrastructure resources (the “stack”) for this solution.	AWS CloudFormation templates
Access the source code and optionally use the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) to deploy the solution.	GitHub repository

Features and benefits

This solution is built on Amazon CloudWatch and uses several CloudWatch features, such as metrics, metrics explorer, logs insights, and dashboards to automate the dashboard set up process, and provide you with a centralized view of your workload performance. This solution also provides demo resources, such as a demo EC2 instance, so that you can preview how this solution works.

This solution provides the following features:

• Preconfigured dashboard for Apache, NGINX, and Puma workloads.

• Automated process to set up an Amazon CloudWatch dashboard.

• Tagging mechanism to add or remove instances from the dashboard.

• Amazon CloudWatch agent configuration files for specific workloads.

Integration with AWS Service Catalog AppRegistry and Application Manager, a capability of Systems Manager

This solution includes a Service Catalog AppRegistry resource to register the solution’s CloudFormation template and its underlying resources as an application in both both AWS Service Catalog AppRegistry and AWS Systems Manager Application Manager. With this integration, you can centrally manage the solution’s resources.