Identifying the root cause of performance problems of your application can often be challenging. Tracking down such issues can be difficult due to their wide variability and dependence on numerous factors, many of which are beyond your control.

AWS has recently introduced Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor, a service that offers insight into the impact of internet-related problems on application performance and availability.

The Internet Monitor service utilizes data that AWS is already gathering from various AWS Regions, edge locations, and networks used by customers to access their application endpoints. This connectivity data is internally utilized by AWS to proactively detect internet connectivity issues and implement measures to enhance customer experiences.

It just focuses monitoring on the areas of the internet that accesses your application rather than monitoring website from all regions making it more cost effective solution for small and large companies.

Key features

• Ease of use – Its very easy to setup and don’t need any infra or software. No coding changing is needed in your application for integration.
• Real time metrics and insights available for indicators like availability and response time.
• Easy integration with other AWS services like SNS, CloudTrail and CloudWatch logs. This enables us to create monitoring and alert solutions for our system.
• Customizable alarms can be set when health scores falls below a certain threshold.

To start, you must create a monitor and link to the resources of the application such as Amazon Virtua Private Cloud(VPC) or CloudFront distribution. This helps the Internet Monitor to recognize the places and networks that communicate with your application, enabling AWS to give precise internet measurements.

Availability and performance scores generated will give an insight into the percentage of traffic which did not get affected. A higher score means your application is stable.  Impact percentage in contrary will denote how much an end user got affected.

Apart from the cost of the log files, this services doesn’t have a fee associated.

In summary, the CloudWatch Internet Monitor is a robust tool that enables you to monitor the performance and availability of your internet-facing applications and services, ensuring a positive user experience for your customers.