How to Effectively Monitor AWS With SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the leading cloud infrastructure services provider globally, with approximately 30% of the market. To help ensure that our customers leveraging AWS maintain optimal performance of their cloud environments, SolarWinds® Observability Self-Hosted offers a broad array of capabilities for monitoring AWS services, providing IT teams with the tools they need to gain deep insight into their cloud infrastructure. This blog explores the key features and benefits of SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted for AWS monitoring, highlighting how it can help organizations achieve unified visibility, automation, and intelligence in their cloud operations.
Overview of Monitored AWS Cloud Services
SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted provides a single pane of glass for monitoring a wide range of AWS services, enabling IT teams to gain visibility over key areas such as compute, network, storage, and databases for their AWS cloud infrastructure alongside their on-premises networks and systems. Specific AWS services that can be monitored include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), and more. This unified visibility simplifies management and enhances operational efficiency by consolidating data from various sources into a cohesive view.
Comprehensive Performance Metrics and Resource Utilization
Continuous monitoring of performance metrics and resource utilization across AWS services is a fundamental capability for SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted. To retrieve status and metric data for monitored clouds, SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted sends API requests to the cloud services. The first 1 million requests per month are free, and any extra requests are charged by the cloud provider. This approach helps ensure that real-time data is collected efficiently, providing deep visibility into resource performance, availability, and usage. Additionally, if specific OS data for memory or additional data using other polling methods (such as Orion® Agent, WMI, or SNMP) is required, the cloud can be managed in the SolarWinds Self-Hosted Platform as a node.
Types of Real-Time AWS Data Collected
SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted collects a wide range of real-time data to provide you with comprehensive monitoring and insights into your AWS environment. These include:
- Performance Metrics: Continuous monitoring of key performance indicators (KPIs) such as CPU usage, memory consumption, disk I/O, and network latency. These metrics help IT teams identify potential bottlenecks and optimize resource allocation to help ensure smooth and efficient operations.
- Network Data: Powerful network monitoring capabilities for AWS cloud environments, which help track network performance, traffic patterns, and availability across VPCs, subnets, and hybrid connections like Direct Connect or VPNs. With real-time visibility into latency, packet loss, and bandwidth utilization, teams can quickly detect and resolve issues before they impact services.
- AWS CloudWatch Metrics and Logs: Integration with AWS CloudWatch to collect metrics and logs from various AWS services. This integration provides a more comprehensive view of the AWS environment, enabling IT teams to correlate AWS CloudWatch data with other performance metrics collected by SolarWinds Observability.
- Application Performance Data: Monitoring application performance by collecting data on response times, error rates, and transaction volumes. This data helps IT teams ensure that applications are running smoothly and efficiently.
- Security Metrics: Providing visibility into security-related metrics, such as access logs, security group configurations, and encryption status. This data helps IT teams identify potential security vulnerabilities and can help ensure compliance with industry standards.
- Resource Utilization: Tracking resource utilization across AWS services, including compute, network, storage, and databases. This data helps organizations optimize their cloud spending by identifying underused or over-provisioned resources.
These examples illustrate the breadth and depth of real-time data collected by SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted, enabling organizations to gain deep insights into their AWS environment and achieve operational excellence.
Additional Benefits of AWS Monitoring with SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted
By unifying AWS monitoring with other IT environments, SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted enhances operational efficiency and simplifies cloud management, helping ensure a seamless, data-driven approach to maintaining cloud health.
Automated Alerts and Anomaly Detection
Automation is a critical component of modern IT operations, and SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted leverages intelligent analytics to streamline monitoring processes. The platform offers automated alerts and anomaly detection capabilities, which help organizations stay ahead of potential issues. For example, if an AWS service experiences an unexpected spike in CPU usage or a sudden drop in network throughput, SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted can automatically generate alerts and notify the relevant IT personnel. This proactive approach enables faster issue resolution and minimizes downtime.
Customizable Dashboards and Reports
Flexibility and customization are key strengths of SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted. The platform allows users to tailor dashboards, alerts, and reports to align with their specific requirements. IT teams can create custom dashboards that display the most relevant metrics and visualizations for their AWS environment, making it easier to monitor performance and identify trends. Additionally, SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted offers robust reporting capabilities, enabling users to generate detailed reports on resource utilization, performance trends, and SLA compliance.
Integration with AWS CloudWatch and Other AWS Services
SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted seamlessly integrates with AWS CloudWatch, allowing users to leverage CloudWatch metrics and logs for enhanced monitoring and analysis. This integration provides a more comprehensive view of the AWS environment, enabling IT teams to correlate AWS CloudWatch data with other performance metrics collected by SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted.
Enhanced Security and Compliance Monitoring
Security is a top priority for organizations operating in the cloud, and SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted offers robust security and compliance monitoring capabilities. The platform provides visibility into security-related metrics, such as access logs, security group configurations, and encryption status. IT teams can use this information to identify potential security vulnerabilities and can help ensure compliance with industry standards. By integrating security monitoring into the overall observability strategy, organizations can better protect their AWS environment from threats and breaches.
Scalability and Flexibility for Growing Cloud Environments
As organizations expand their cloud footprint, scalability becomes a critical consideration. SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted is designed to scale with growing cloud environments, providing the flexibility needed to monitor an increasing number of AWS services and resources. The availability of a wide range of capabilities in a single solution allows users to add new monitoring capabilities as needed, helping ensure that the observability solution can evolve alongside the organization's cloud strategy.
How to Add AWS Monitoring to SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted
We have made it very easy to add AWS monitoring to SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted. Simply set up an AWS cloud account and then select the services to monitor. Here are the steps to follow:
- Gather credentials in your AWS cloud console.
- Add the first cloud account to the SolarWinds Self-Hosted Platform Web Console.
- Configure your cloud account to interact with the SolarWinds Platform.
Once configured, you can explore cloud instances and VMs on the Cloud Summary page, providing a comprehensive view of your AWS environment.
