Operations & Services
AWS Infrastructure Monitoring & Custom CloudWatch Dashboards
Custom AWS infrastructure monitoring with CloudWatch dashboards for real-time visibility, performance tracking, and proactive infrastructure management.
Client
Multi-Location Operations Company
Date
July 2024
AWS CloudWatch
CloudWatch Dashboards
CloudWatch Alarms
AWS Lambda
DynamoDB
API Gateway
SNS
EventBridge
Infrastructure as Code
Observability
The Challenge
A multi-location operations company running critical infrastructure on AWS lacked comprehensive visibility into their cloud resources and performance metrics. Their infrastructure spanned multiple AWS services including Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, and more, but without centralized monitoring, infrastructure issues went undetected. Key challenges included:
- No centralized view of AWS infrastructure health across services
- Limited visibility into Lambda function performance and errors
- Difficult to track DynamoDB performance and capacity utilization
- No real-time alerting for infrastructure issues
- Unable to correlate infrastructure metrics across services
- Manual investigation of performance degradation
- Lack of historical trending and baseline establishment
Our Solution
We designed and implemented a comprehensive AWS infrastructure monitoring solution using CloudWatch custom dashboards, metrics, and alarms to provide real-time visibility and proactive alerting across all AWS services.
Custom CloudWatch Dashboard Design
- Architected multi-service monitoring dashboards
- Created executive overview dashboard for infrastructure health
- Built service-specific dashboards for deep-dive analysis
- Designed location-based performance dashboards
- Implemented metric correlation across services
- Created cost tracking and trending visualizations
- Built custom widgets for business-critical metrics
Lambda Function Monitoring
- Implemented comprehensive Lambda metrics collection
- Created invocation count and error rate tracking
- Built duration and timeout monitoring
- Designed concurrent execution tracking
- Implemented cold start detection and analysis
- Created throttling and failure alerting
- Built cost-per-function tracking dashboards
DynamoDB Performance Monitoring
- Configured table-level performance metrics
- Implemented read/write capacity utilization tracking
- Created throttled request monitoring
- Built query and scan performance analysis
- Designed auto-scaling effectiveness tracking
- Implemented hot partition detection
- Created cost optimization recommendations
API Gateway Monitoring
- Built API endpoint performance dashboards
- Implemented request count and latency tracking
- Created error rate monitoring by endpoint
- Designed 4xx and 5xx error analysis
- Built integration latency tracking
- Implemented cache hit/miss ratio monitoring
- Created throttling and quota tracking
Custom Metrics & Alarms
- Developed custom business metrics collection
- Implemented composite alarms for complex scenarios
- Created multi-metric anomaly detection
- Built intelligent alarm throttling
- Designed escalation policies based on severity
- Implemented alarm history and trend analysis
- Created SNS integration for multi-channel alerting
Infrastructure Observability
- Designed log aggregation and analysis workflows
- Implemented log insights queries for troubleshooting
- Created metric filters for custom event tracking
- Built distributed tracing correlation
- Designed cross-service dependency mapping
- Implemented infrastructure event timeline
- Created automated runbook integration
Results
The infrastructure monitoring solution transformed operational visibility and management:
- Centralized Visibility: Single pane of glass for all AWS infrastructure
- Proactive Alerting: Real-time notifications before customer impact
- Faster Troubleshooting: Reduced mean time to identify infrastructure issues by 80%
- Performance Optimization: Detected and resolved bottlenecks proactively
- Executive Insights: Real-time dashboards for leadership visibility
- Improved Reliability: Prevented outages through early warning detection
- Historical Analysis: Baseline establishment for capacity planning
Key Achievements
- Custom Dashboards: Tailored monitoring views for different teams and services
- Comprehensive Coverage: Monitoring across Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, and more
- Intelligent Alerting: Context-aware alarms reducing alert fatigue
- Performance Insights: Real-time visibility into infrastructure performance
- Business Metrics: Custom metrics aligned with operational KPIs
- Cross-Service Correlation: Ability to trace issues across service boundaries
- Automated Remediation: Integration with EventBridge for automatic responses
- Infrastructure as Code: Dashboard and alarm configurations in version control
Technologies Used
- Monitoring: AWS CloudWatch, CloudWatch Dashboards, CloudWatch Logs
- Metrics: Custom Metrics, CloudWatch Metrics, Metric Math
- Alerting: CloudWatch Alarms, SNS, Composite Alarms
- AWS Services: Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, S3, EventBridge
- Integration: SNS Topics, Email, Slack Integration
- Automation: EventBridge Rules, Lambda Automation
- Visualization: Custom Widgets, Log Insights, Metric Queries
- Observability: Distributed Tracing, Log Analytics, Performance Monitoring
- Infrastructure: CloudFormation, Infrastructure as Code