Cloudwatch

Using CloudWatch to Monitor VPN Connections

VPNs are essential for modern internet security, and most organizations use them as part of their IT infrastructure. Cloud IT systems are no different, however in a cloud environment there are some interesting opportunities for automating the monitoring and maintenance of IT resources. A great example in AWS is that you can set up CloudWatch alarms to track the status of your resources and take automatic action in case of a failure event. Once you have a functional alarm, you can do things like send notification emails, repair resources, and run serverless code using AWS Lambda. By leveraging the power of serverless functions, the alarm responses you can design are only limited by your creativity.

Using CloudWatch Log Insights and AWS Athena to troubleshoot Network issues

Enabling logs and configuring them is an important step in securing your AWS environment, however you have to also be using them effectively! Just monitoring your environment isn’t enough, you should also be proactive with the data you’re collecting. Today I’ll focus on VPC Flow Logs, where and how they’re stored, and how to use that data to troubleshoot common network issues.

Finding your Logs

First off, determine if VPC Flow Logs are enabled. There are two possible ways to deliver flow logs data; to CloudWatch Logs or to an S3 bucket. If Flow Logs already exist you’ll be able to see the destination.

Monitoring a Web Server on AWS

Web servers break. Thankfully, we have tools like Autoscaling for EC2 and Elastic Load Balancers to minimize the impact of server downtime, but it remains a fact of IT life that servers can fail for any number of reasons. To get ahead of a failure event, it’s good practice to have some monitoring set up on your machines. In this article, we’ll go through some basic monitoring you can deploy on an Apache EC2 instance and integrate with Cloudwatch Metrics.