AWS CloudWatch and Systems Manager (SSM) Workshop

This page contains links and hints and tips for this workshop.

This page is public, contains no access information, PII or other non public info will be shared here. The presenter will provide more details about accessing the lab environment privately with you during the session.

Labs - AWS CloudWatch and Systems Manager Workshop

NOTE: This lab uses the Dublin AWS Region, it’s named eu-west-1. When in the browser you’ll want to ensure you remain in this region. We’ll also be using AWS Cloudshell which allows to use a browser based shell that is already configured to work with your lab environment.

In Part 1 you’ll learn how to build CloudWatch Alarms and Dashboards to monitor your infrastructure and applications. This will give you hands on experience in CloudWatch Metrics, Logs, Alarms and Dashboards. In production you would typically use third party tooling that will access CloudWatch APIs.

Part 1: CloudWatch (~2 hours)Header anchor link

In this section you will learn how to build CloudWatch Alarms and Dashboards to monitor your infrastructure and applications.

After completing this workshop you will be able to:

Find important events across your infrastructure- or application logs in seconds!
Setup Alarms for critical events.
Deploy and upgrade software (agents) to your hosts at scale.
Deploy application configuration files to your hosts at scale.

Content:

Introduction to CloudWatch
Lab: CloudWatch Metrics
Lab: CloudWatch Logs
Lab: CloudWatch Alarms
Lab: CloudWatch Dashboards

In Part 2 you will learn how to use Systems Manager to manage your EC2 Instances and Applications at scale. Think runbooks, patching, fleet management, managed adhoc RDP and SSH access and other sys admin tasks as the domain of AWS Systems Manager.

In this workshop we build our hands on environment and synthetic data using IaaC. Think about how you would tag, name, group and lifecycle manage metrics and log data.

Prerequisites

You’ll need a text editor, web browser and access to your email address to retrieve TOTP code for access to the lab environment

Part 2.1 Cloudwatch Metrics

Cloudwatch provides metric visibility from most AWS services. The following lab sections demonstrate how you can access and manage the dynamic nature of cloud resources and the metrics they produce. Key takeaways here are:

  • We want to get to insights fast and minimise the impact of noisy data.
  • Automation is key to managing cloud resources.

Part 2.2.2 CloudWatch Logs Insights

Here we use a provided python script to generate synthetic log data. We’ll connect to an EC2 created earlier to run our python script.

2.4.1 Creating Dashboards

We can use the virtual conference chat to share your custom CloudWatch Dashboard if needed

3.1.2 Using Amazon Managed documents

Once we start the EC2 updates we take a break while we wait for the updates to finish

References

Continue reading articles in my Amazon Web Services series