Automate the process of setting up an Amazon CloudWatch dashboard

Publication date: April 2021 (Last update: November 2021)

The CloudWatch Monitoring on AWS 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 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 key 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

This implementation guide describes architectural considerations and configuration steps for deploying CloudWatch Monitoring on AWS in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. It includes links to AWS CloudFormation templates that launch and configure the AWS services required to deploy this solution using AWS best practices for security and availability.

The solution is intended for DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT managers who are responsible for workload and performance monitoring.