Monitoring with Cloudwatch

When an issue occurs in a system, it’s vital to address it. To do so, monitoring and logs are key. This lesson is about monitoring. It’s important to be able to track how an application is behaving when it is executing. Monitoring is also done on repositories or, in the case of DynamoDB, databases. For this reason, AWS offers a service called CloudWatch that allows us to monitor our DynamoDB databases.

What is monitoring?

Monitoring is all about observing the behavior of an application at runtime. To do so, metrics must be collected and configured. After that, they can be analyzed to determine the health status of the application.

In general, to monitor an application, it’s necessary to obtain information about its behavior, namely performance, CPU and memory consumption. After that, you can create dashboards to show the information in a clear way and, if possible, also generate alerts that allow taking actions on time when anything is failing.

CloudWatch

CloudWatch is the service that AWS offers to monitor the information systems that are running on this cloud provider. Of course, this service allows you to monitor DynamoDB tables as well. As AWS explains in the official site of this service, the way it works is according to the following image: