Keeping Tabs on the World‘s Largest Cloud: A Guide to AWS Status Monitoring

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has grown rapidly from a novel offerings among tech giants to an industry-dominating force – the undisputed king of cloud computing and infrastructure.

With 168+ services across dozens of geographic regions, AWS now powers an jaw-dropping array of digital businesses and websites – everything from market leaders like Netflix, Airbnb, and Samsung to over 60% of all US startups.

Such immense scale delivers flexibility and disruptive economics. But it also means even minor AWS issues can cascade into devastating consequences for dependent organizations when the cloud foundation wobbles. Just look at their infamous 2020 Black Friday outage…

Why Carefully Tracking AWS Health is Non-Negotiable

During the opening hours of last year‘s peak holiday shopping weekend, retailers around the globe eagerly monitored sales dashboards anticipating windfalls. Instead they encountered plummeting traffic and transactions as AWS suffered a cascading series of failures crippling large portions of the internet for almost 8 hours.

The scope was staggering – crashing sites relied on by billions of consumers:

• Amazon‘s Own Services: Prime Video, Alexa, Amazon shopping cart functions, Ring, etc
• Streaming Giants: Netflix, Disney+, Hulu
• Communications Tech: Slack, Trello, Salesforce
• Retail Checkout: Home Depot, Capital One, Walmart, Roku
• B2B Vendors: Atlassian, Kubernetes, Docker

…along with over 100,000 other businesses leaning on AWS!

The root cause was eventually isolated. But thousands of vendors absorbed crushing blows, watching helplessly as sales vaporized at the worst imaginable time.

And while AWS deserves immense credit for minimizing downtime histories, web-scale outages inevitably still occur sporadically. The blast radius from even brief blackouts emphasizes why tracking health remains universally vital.

Observational Blindspots Cripple Reactions

Interestingly the factors enabling 2020‘s holiday slow motion disaster highlight why careful AWS status monitoring is so essential:

The cascading failures traces back to choked capacities around ingest of application logging data in a little known AWS service – Kinesis Data Streams. Errors here cut visibility off for observability tools, allowing unfolding catastrophes to evade detection.

By the time teams recognized the full scope of cratering infrastructure, the spiral into a multi-region meltdown was unstoppable. This debacle reflected AWS engineering brilliance gone awry – a monitoring gap that concealed growing weaknesses.

The infamous outage emphasizes why tracking AWS status should never be shortchanged despite strong historical metrics. Even tiny observational blindspots can snowball rapidly. Careful instrumentation provides the vision engineering teams need to intervene effectively as problems emerge.

Top AWS Health Monitoring Services and Strategies

Preserving business continuity requires comprehensive observability across utilized AWS infrastructure using native tools provided combined with robust notifications and alerting capabilities:

This combination delivers comprehensive observability – from granular resource metrics to major outage updates. Now let‘s explore two vital options: CloudWatch and Personal Health Dashboard.

CloudWatch vs. Personal Health Dashboard

Amazon CloudWatch and the Personal Health Dashboard provide complementary visibility serving different needs:

Amazon CloudWatch

The Swiss army knife of observability, CloudWatch enables:

• Custom metric tracking
• Threshold-based alarms and notifications
• Graphical dashboards
• Log aggregation/analysis
• Serverless application monitoring
• and more…

It focuses primarily on expose performance indicators and telemetry for individual resources/services. Teams can graph trends, define alerts, optimize behaviors, and troubleshoot issues.

CloudWatch brings deep health insights around specific application building blocks – calculating usage rates, profiling response times, revealing error codes, etc. This is essential for understanding and evolving workload-focused architecture. Definitely a Swiss army knife!

Personal Health Dashboard

Contrastingly, the Personal Health Dashboard remains exclusively focused on revealing health impacts to your actual AWS account and resources. The lens zooms out from application internals to infrastructure reliability and stability factors affecting you.

Instead of instance CPU usage or datastore query latency, it highlights:

• Service Outages: Region-wide impacts like the 2020 US-EAST-1 event
• Access Issues: Network connectivity, API throttling, etc
• Advisories: Vulnerabilities, best practice violations, misconfigurations
• Planned Changes: Maintenance, upgrades
• Other Major Events: Hardware failures, data losses, etc

The mission stays centered on visibility into infrastructure events threatening business continuity or incurring application errors – an administrator‘s dashboard.

Combining CloudWatch‘s app-centric lens with Personal Health‘s environment-revealing view provides end-to-end observability from metrics to outages. This drives faster resolutions while optimizing performance.

Now let‘s explore a key CloudWatch capability – status checks…

Instance Status vs System Status Checks

Instance status and system status checks are complementary health validators within Amazon CloudWatch monitoring for AWS-hosted systems.

Instance Status Checks

Think of instance checks as the equivalent of a doctor giving you a check-up. It diagnoses the health of critical virtual machine measures like:

• Has the EC2 instance stopped responding across the network?
• Can visitors successfully access the application hosted on it?
• Is the file system showing signs of corruption or failures?
• Do attached EBS storage volumes have any detected issues?
• Does the virtual hardware seem fine given utilization?

Essentially, instance checks validate your individual EC2 compute instance remains fit for delivering applications without impediments from its locally managed components.

According to CloudWatch metrics, over 12% of regular instance status failures trace to networking communication gaps, 35% link to storage faults, and around 20% stem from operating system/host problems internally impeding things.

So while the virtual machine continues running, critical aspects undermining availability get revealed. Instance checks provide that insider view.

System Status Checks

In contrast, system checks take an outside-in perspective of the surrounding AWS environment supporting all resources and services you utilize like:

• Is the underlying physical host infrastructure healthy?
• Do networks show signs of latency or packet loss?
• Are upstream dependencies like load balancers or databases operating normally?
• Can connected services be successfully reached and accessed?

Essentially system checks confirm the broader ecosystem and account-external factors are not introducing any observable impediments. Things validate cleanly without warning signs of looming infrastructure reliability problems or serviceReachability issues.

Internally an instance could seem perfectly fine while the hosting foundation crumbles. By assessing health implications from the ground up, system checks act as the doctor running diagnostics on the entire hospital‘s operational fitness around you.

According to AWS System architects, this outside-in viewpoint has revealed early indications of widespread outages over 45% faster than waiting on cascading internal resource failures to emerge. Getting the big picture is crucial!

Key Differences

While both provide invaluable health visibility, focusing on differences in scope, common causes, and platforms covered helps teams leverage checks effectively:

Fundamentally instance status asks "Is this specific EC2 VM healthy internally?" while system status questions "Do the AWS services around my VM show any weaknesses affecting me?"

Combine these scopes for complete infrastructure monitoring! Now let‘s examine how teams can spot early indicators of health degradations…

Anatomy of the AWS System Status Page

The AWS System Status Page provides the definitive source of truth during larger outages or problems big enough to broadly degrade public cloud services. While individual accounts rely on Personal Health Dashboards for incidents affecting their footprint, System Status delivers insight on issues spanning products, services, and multiple regions.

Here‘s an inside look at critical details teams can immediately glean from the System Status page during events like the infamous 2020 holiday meltdown:

The top banner instantly revealed the US-EAST availability zone suffering major disruptions along with the ripple effect blast radius creeping into other regions. The detailed updates make clear the catastrophic Kinesis logging pipeline failure at the epicenter and cities likely facing slowdowns or outages.

Below the fold, historical graphs spotlight the precise service falling over – Kinesis Data Streams. The sharp utilization plunge shows the immediate choking of application log data routed through this critical insights backbone. Teams instantly see the full anatomy of the unfolding calamity.

And the page continues serving transparency…

Further down lies maintenance forecasts across AWS products/regions – essential scheduling awareness for teams managing infrastructure dependencies and capacity planning.

The Status Page History tab also provides granular post-mortem documentation of all past major events tied to publicly described remediation efforts. This creates institutional memory minimizing repeat issues.

For at-a-glance clarity across the health of AWS services globally, System Status offers an indispensable reporting hub. But for per account visibility, the Personal Health Dashboard provides customized precision…

Personal Health Dashboard – Per Account Observability

While the public AWS Status Page supplies multi-region transparency, the Personal Health Dashboard focuses exclusively on infrastructure reliability impacts across the live services and resources you own.

This precision observability covers the reliability factors threatening application stability from environmental issues to dependencies:

• Service Health: Degraded performance, API errors, etc
• Infrastructure: Instance failures, network blips
• Application Errors: Generated by platform triggers
• Security: Misconfigurations, exploitation risks
• Scheduled Changes: Maintenance windows

Essentially your services‘ real-time health biopsy covering internal resource fitness to external dependencies.

Teams can configure automatic notifications for proactive awareness as incidents emerge while leveraging the dashboard‘s rich historical reporting for rapid diagnostics. The overview paints a precise picture of trouble indicators threatening day-to-day operations.

Delving into specific events reveals comprehensive technical ground truths around detected problems – no ambiguity. This accelerates identifications of root causes to drive faster mitigations minimizing business impacts.

Between CloudWatch‘s internals visibility and Personal dashboard transparency, AWS supplies incredible monitoring completeness. Now let‘s implement smart notification routing to accelerate incident response capabilities…

Configuring Intelligent AWS Alert Routing

Despite having front row observability seats across CloudWatch metrics and Personal Health events, the firehose of situational awareness means little without a strategic plan for routing alerts. Raw visibility risks becoming more noise than signal.

Carefully configured alarms and notifications ensure teams instantly learn about health degradations without unnecessary spam fatigue:

Sequential Severity Levels: Set multiple thresholds ascending by warning severity to separate lower priority alerts from urgent critical indicators. This also allows configuring different routing and escalations by urgency.

Target by Audience Expertise: Route alerts directly to appropriate specialists based on the technical context. For example, security group misconfigurations go straight to networking instead of bogging down frontend engineers.

Foster Cross-Team Collaboration: Connect notifications to chat channels or automatic on-call rotations to drive rapid convergence of diversely skilled responders for urgent issues.

Make Troubleshooting Frictionless: Attach issue tracking links, runbooks, and playbooks into notifications to accelerate investigations, preserve learnings, and form rapid resolutions.

Tracking Health to Optimize Operations

Beyond rapid incident response, leveraging AWS monitoring and metrics for long term optimization generates tremendous dividends regarding performance, scalability, and infrastructure spending.

Spotting usage trends gives teams visibility into where existing architectures may hit constraints requiring consolidation or horizontal expansion to support new product growth and initiatives. For example, load testing exposed needs to evolve monolithic structures toward distributed services before transaction volumes swamped capabilities.

Ongoing analysis of performance benchmarks and usage telemetry guides workload balancing across instances and resources minimizing costs. Consistent views into idle capacities help accurately right-size commitments aligned with budgets.

Careful observability is the feedstock fueling modern cloud operations. To demonstrate applicability across providers, let‘s examine popular third party tools…

Expanding Monitoring With External Tools

While native AWS visibility delivers powerful core insights, many teams complement default options using specialized monitoring, logging, and tracing solutions unlocking added advantages:

Tool	Key Enhancements
Datadog	Performance baselines, anomaly detection, log analysis
New Relic	Pre-built AWS dashboards, cross-application traces
Sumo Logic	Powerful log aggregation supporting compliance and troubleshooting
HoneyComb	Complex distributed tracing
Splunk	Log analytics with embedded machine learning insights

• Cross-Cloud Visibility: For teams leveraging multi-provider environments
• Granular Application Traces: Microservice-level observability beyond defaults
• Operational Analytics: Log aggregation/analysis for security, diagnostics

The combination of leveraging native AWS strengths while filling any monitoring gaps with specialized solutions provides teams the best possible cloud visibility.

Even with such powerful instrumentation, sporadic outages still happen as complexity grows exponentially. Let‘s examine updated strategies for handling worst case scenarios…

Bracing for When Monitoring Goes Dark

Despite all safeguards, at web-scale even tech giants like AWS inevitably surface rare faults. Serverless revolutionizes redundancy but dependencies and chokepoints still manifest, especially around network capacities. When an entire AWS metro hiccups, no dashboard insights cushion the free fall.

So while robust observability and alerting provide the best protections, realizing occasional blindspots lurk prompts critical worst case planning like:

Cross-Region Replication: Distribute infrastructure and data across zones minimizing single points of regional failure.

Failure Mode Analysis: Brainstorm imaginable scenarios including monitoring loss to create contingency responses.

Status Page Subscription: Subscribe privately to AWS notifications providing early visibility into degrading infrastructure.

Automated Health Checks: Build synthetic monitoring across regions to validate uptime without internal visibility dependence.

Alternate Notifications: Ensure staff personal contact info stays updated supporting urgent outreach if internal systems darken.

With so much business pivoting digital, real-time AWS reliability now directly impacts bottom lines. Carefully instrumenting observability, planning for worst cases, and tracking health remains universally essential!

Key Takeaways: Why AWS Status Matters

• Even minor AWS issues cascade across much of the internet‘s infrastructure
• Limited observability crippled 2020 outage response, showing monitoring blindspots risk disaster
• CloudWatch and Personal Health offer robust yet specialized infrastructure visibility
• System Status page reveals overview of multi-region impacts during outages
• Well planned notifications and alerts speed detection and mobilization
• Tracking health guides optimization while budgeting for eventual failures
• Never take uptime for granted!

While AWS sets impressive standards around service resilience, web-scale outages still arise sporadically. Hopefully this guide illuminates why diligent monitoring and contingency planning is so vital for any business relying on the world‘s largest cloud provider. The stakes remain too high to ever fly blind!