Windows Platform and Experiences
Working with customers on migrating, operating and modernizing Windows workloads has helped us build a portfolio of tools and services that provide customers a simple to use, integrated experience for managing Microsoft workloads on AWS including:
- Building and managing compliant enterprise images with Amazon EC2 Image Builder
- Deploying and configuring complex applications simply with AWS Launch Wizard
- Automatically setup application monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights
- Managing and troubleshooting your hybrid server fleet with AWS Systems Manager Fleet Manager
CloudWatch Application Insights
Easily add enterprise application monitoring on AWS
Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights intelligently and automatically sets up the recommended metrics, telemetry logs and alarms for your application resources and continuously analyzes the data for issues and problem signatures within your applications. With just a few simple steps you can easily set up essential telemetry for your EC2, Lambda, RDS and Container resources and numerous data sources such as Windows Performance Counters, .NET/.NET Core Java, SQL Server, Oracle, CLR metrics, database logs and much more. Application Insights is workload aware and analyzes the entire application stack for known and potential problems and their possible root-cause. It also uses machine learning techniques to review historical data to identify additional potential problem areas and improve problem analysis.
How it works
CloudWatch Application Insights can be accessed in the left panel under Settings in the CloudWatch console under the Insights tab. You can also add enterprise application monitoring as part of your automated build processes via a few simple JSON or YAML commands in CloudFormation templates. You have two ways to get started. One option is to organize all your enterprise applications and resources in AWS Resource Groups. Once you input your Resource Group name to CloudWatch Application Insights in the setup wizard the service will discover all the applications and resources in the Resource Group and automatically setup the recommended metrics, telemetry, logs and alarms. Alternatively, you can select the option to have CloudWatch Application Insights automatically discover all the applications and resources in your account and automatically setup the entire account with the recommended monitoring.
Use cases
Easy setup of enterprise application monitoring
It can be difficult to determine monitoring requirements for an application and cumbersome to coordinate setup across database, network and system administrators. CloudWatch Application Insights sets up and recommends the best metrics, logs and telemetry to use for your enterprise application stack and set them automatically in just a few clicks.
Automatic setup of important alerts
Monitoring has no value unless the right people in IT and Enterprise support are aware of the key issues to watch for. CloudWatch Application Insights will automatically create alerts to provide timely, accurate and relevant information about your application’s health. We will notify you about issues such as failed database backups, memory leak errors and IIS server bottlenecks.
Centralized monitoring and quick problem resolution
It’s ok if you don’t know what the right things are to monitor or the important issues to observe. CloudWatch Application Insights will recommend and automatically create dashboards optimized for your enterprise applications to help you quickly identify, troubleshoot and resolve issues. Through built-in integrations with AWS Systems Manager you can automatically create OpsItems to kick off run books for problems.
Customer references
Monitoring a fleet of Microsoft SQL Servers for preemptive problem identification
PageUp brings together the entire talent lifecycle. They use CloudWatch Application Insights to monitor a fleet of Microsoft SQL Servers which are a large and key component of their product suite. CloudWatch Application Insights easily sets up SQL Server log ingestion and provides them a clear view of DB infrastructure errors and trends in an easy to read dashboard.
“We went on a venture to improve our logging, information capture and preemptive problem identification. CloudWatch Application Insights provided a straightforward solution to bring in the needed logs, extract the correct metrics and identify when events took place. It has been particularly helpful in catching low disk space and high workload scenarios, which in the past we sometimes did not discover until they were impacting services. With CloudWatch Application Insights, we can give our customers a better performing and more reliable service with less effort and cost.”
Giles Pollock, Senior DevOps Engineer PageUp People
Resources
by Saleha Haider, 18 Sep 2020
A new, more simplified setup for X-Ray tracing of .NET applications
by Steve Roberts 17 Jul 2020
by Purvi Goyal and Rodney Bozo 01 Jul 2019