Introduction

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is a web service that provides resizeable computing capacity-literally, server instances in Amazon's data centers-that you use to build and host your software systems. You can get access to the infrastructure resources that AWS provides by using APIs, or web tools and utilities.

With AWS, you use and pay for only the capacity that you need. This eliminates the need to make large and expensive hardware purchases, reduces the need to forecast traffic, and enables you to automatically scale your IT resources to deal with changes in requirements or spikes in popularity related to your application or service.

With many mission-critical applications now being delivered via the cloud, end-users have come to expect from the cloud the same quality of service that local service deployments are known to deliver. This means that even the slightest dip in performance levels will not be tolerated!

A sudden non-availability of the cloud, no matter how brief, or a slowdown/failure of any of its regions/availability zones/instances, can make it impossible for cloud providers to build and launch mission-critical services on the cloud and for consumers to access these services for prolonged periods. If you are a (public or private) cloud service provider therefore, your primary concerns would be - can people access my service? Is the self service portal up? Can users see their VMs? Can users connect to their VMs? If not, you need to be able to determine why the problem is happening - is it the web front-end? is it due to the virtualization platform? is it due to the SAN? etc. The action you take depends on what you diagnose as being the root-cause of the problem. Besides problem diagnosis, you are also interested in understanding how you can get more out of your current cloud investments. You want to be able to see how to balance load across your servers to serve a maximum number of users and how you can optimize the capacity of the infrastructure without sacrificing on performance. You need performance management “FOR” the cloud.

eG Enterprise is a unique solution that can provide you performance management FROM the cloud, OF the cloud and FOR the cloud!

Figure 1 : How eG monitors the cloud

To deliver performance management For the AWS cloud in particular, the solution offers two specialized monitoring models - the AWS Cloud model and the AWS Region model. The AWS Cloud monitoring model provides you with proactive updates on the overall health and status of the cloud and points you to unavailable regions/availability zones and resource-hungry instances in the cloud. To zoom into the health of specific regions and the instances operating within those regions, use the AWS Region model.

This document engages in detailed discussions on both the models.