Monitoring AWS Hosts

Foglight for AWS Hosts brings comprehensive, non-siloed, enterprise-class monitoring to the industry’s leading cloud computing platform. Used standalone, Foglight for AWS Hosts is a robust monitoring solution providing insight into applications. When used in conjunction with other Foglight monitoring components, operators can collect and correlate information across infrastructure layers. This added value makes Foglight for AWS Hosts an invaluable part of this industry-leading Database Performance Monitoring solution.

Foglight for AWS Hosts monitors all operating systems and database engines for RDS, bringing in critical availability data and in-depth performance metrics on the system and individual process usage of CPU, memory, network, and disk resources. By accessing data from multiple AWS sources, including the AWS SDK for Java API, CloudWatch, and CloudWatch Logs services, Foglight for AWS Hosts brings together performance data for RDS hosts into a unified interface.

This section covers the following key areas:

Introduction to AWS Hosts

Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon, is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully-featured services from data centers globally. The AWS Cloud spans 77 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions worldwide, with plans announced for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions. Partners number in the millions and span all sizes and industries.

AWS provides services hosted on various Linux/Unix and Windows operating systems. These services include Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). EC2 provides secure, scalable compute capacity in the cloud and direct access to a virtual machine customized to the user’s needs. RDS provides several database engine types and automates many administrative tasks while providing easy scalability.

Ease of Installation

Installation of the solution takes only minutes. One remote agent can monitor an entire AWS region. Configuration requires only a valid IAM user with the necessary permissions and IDs for the EC2 and RDS instances you wish to monitor. Aurora Cluster nodes are automatically discovered and monitored without the need to reconfigure the agent when nodes are added or removed.

Data Visualization and Reporting

Foglight for AWS Hosts provides quick access to vital host statistics. The solution leverages rich dashboards and robust data analysis to quickly uncover critical issues affecting host resource utilization, allocations, and processes. Foglight for AWS integrates data from several AWS sources and incorporates these metrics into logical dashboard groups.

Extensibility

Through the AWS cloud, Amazon offers a broad range of solutions in product categories, including but not limited to Analytics, Business Productivity, Customer Engagement, Database, and Machine Learning. The Foglight for AWS Hosts solution provides the interface necessary to monitor virtually any AWS cloud service. SMA maintains a library of supported services, with new ones being created every day.

Paying Dividends

With feature-rich out-of-the-box dashboards and rules, Foglight for AWS Hosts provides unparalleled insight into your AWS services infrastructure and offers immediate benefits to system administrators. As data is collected, the solution pays additional dividends delivering historical trend analysis, scheduled reports, and improved alerting. Operators can easily create user-defined dashboards to represent data in a manner unique to their organization.

Combined, these features bring great insight into database and application availability and ensure improved access to mission-critical data.