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Monitoring & Alarms

All services, applications, and consumers SHOULD have a CloudWatch Alarm set up.

Multiple alarms MAY be set up.

Owners SHOULD identify and monitor other key success metrics.

Alarm Standards

Alarms MUST be named consistently:

  • The name MUST be in upper camel case and MUST be prefixed with the component name. For example: BibServiceErrorAlarm.

Alarms SHOULD generally use the sum of a metric to trigger an alarm.

Alarms SHOULD notify a SNS topic when triggered.

Alarms SHOULD be added to an alarms dashboard.

Testing

Alarms SHOULD be tested as part of the Production Readiness process:

  • This can often be done during a CHAOS session. For example:
    • Turning off an upstream service or reducing or raising alarm threshold in order to artificially trigger alarm.
    • Verify all people get emails that should; and that dashboard updates appropriately.

Alarm Triggers

Log Messages

All services, applications, and consumers MUST create a metric filter for their log messages of severity ERROR and greater.

The metric filter MUST be named and namespaced consistently:

  • The namespace MUST be LogMetrics.
  • The name MUST be in upper camel case and MUST be prefixed with the component name. For example: BibServiceError.

The RECOMMENDED search for a metric filter is { $.levelCode <= 3 }.

The metric created from the metric filter MUST be used to trigger an alarm.

How to Set up a Metric

  1. Log in the AWS Service with your credentials.

  2. Go to CloudWatch by clicking Services dropdown menu from the top navigation and choose CloudWatch.

  3. Go to Logs from the left navigation and find the log group you want to build the metric on from the Log Groups list.

    • Warning: Be careful about choosing the correct log group - especially for Elastic Beanstalk log groups (see a previous post-mortem that had metric filters improperly configured).

  4. Click the left circle of the log, and then go up to the top of the list, click Create Metric Filter.

  5. In Define Logs Metric Filter page, enter the filter you like in Filter Pattern field, such as { $.levelCode <= 3 }. More details for Filter Pattern, see here. Then click Assign Metric.

  6. In Create Metric Filter and Assign a Metric page, enter your filter name and metric name based on the conventions from the previous paragraph. Also, notice that all the customized metrics SHOULD be assigned in the Metric Namespace of LogMetrics. Click Create Filter to finish creating the metric.

Other Alarms

Additional alarms MAY be set up for other metrics. For example:

  • HTTP errors (5xx, 4xx status codes)
  • Lambda errors
  • Kinesis errors

Alarm Configuration

How to Set up an Alarm

  1. You SHOULD set up a SNS Topic before you set up the alarm, so the alarm will have the place to go.

  2. Go to CloudWatch by clicking Services dropdown menu from the top navigation and choose CloudWatch.

  3. If it is your first alarm of the metric, a big chance you might not have any logs in the metric yet, thus you will not be able to see the metric by searching it. To set up the alarm on it, go to Logs from the left navigation. And find the log that has your metric from Log Groups.

  4. On the log, you will find that it indicates how many filters it has on Metric Filters column. Click the link such as 1 filter.

  5. Now you will be on the page that has all the filters the log has. On the filter you want, you can find a link to Create Alarm on the top right corner of the filter block.

  6. In the pop-up Create Alarm window, first enter the name and the threshold of the alarm under Alarm Threshold section. The name SHOULD follow the naming conventions. In Whenever section, is: is usually set up to greater and equal to 1.

  7. In Additional settings section, set Treat missing data as: as good.

  8. In Actions section, set Whenever this alarm: as State is ALARM, and Send notification to: as the SNS Topic you have already created.

  9. In Alarm Preview section, choose your preferred period yet the Statistic SHOULD be Standard and Sum.

  10. Click Create Alarm to finish it.

SNS Topic

The SNS topic SHOULD be setup before creating an alarm.

The SNS topic MUST be named consistently and SHOULD be reused for all the component alarms.

  • The name MUST be in upper camel case and MUST be prefixed with the component name. For example: BibServiceErrorAlarm.

The SNS topic SHOULD notify the component owner(s) by email or other method.

How to Set up a SNS Topic

  1. Click Services dropdown menu from the top navigation and choose Simple Notification Service under the category of Messaging.

  2. Click Create topic on the page, and name your topic following the naming conventions from the previous paragraph. And then create the topic.

  3. You should be on Topic details page now. In Subscription section, click Create subscription. In the Protocol dropdown menu, choose the method you want to recieve the notifications. Generally we use Email. Then, in the Endpoint field, enter your email address. Finally, click Create subscription.