What is AWS Monitoring? 

AWS monitoring consistently tracks and observes various AWS resources in real-time. It ensures continuous monitoring of AWS cloud environment, addressing performance, security, cost, and various other services before they become problematic.  

Why do we Monitor AWS Resources? 

The main goal of monitoring AWS is to ensure that the infrastructure and applications consistently perform as expected. Monitoring AWS is beneficial for many reasons: 

• It manages the AWS services by checking their health performance. 
• It tracks discrepancy in security and performance. 
• It monitors hybrid cloud and on-premises environments. 
• It automatically takes actions to correct abnormal situations when they get out of control. 

Primarily, it monitors the AWS environments and helps identify areas for improvement in performance and cost. One can monitor AWS resources using both native and third-party tools.

Best AWS Monitoring Tools  

1. Amazon CloudWatch 
AWS CloudWatch monitors and manages AWS, on-premises, and hybrid cloud architecture. It is Amazon’s default observability service for developers and IT teams. 

It collects, visualizes, and reports metrics, logs, and events from services, applications, and other resources running on the AWS platform and on-premises servers. 

CloudWatch lets you monitor discrepancy behavior, understand metrics and logs, set alarms, troubleshoot issues, and take automated actions without disrupting the workflow. 

2. Amazon CloudTrail 
AWS CloudTrail tracks API calls and user activity across the AWS infrastructure and includes actions of a user, role, or other AWS service offering a comprehensive audit trail for monitoring and security purposes. AWS CloudTrail tracks the activity as events. 

Examples of AWS CloudTrail events include actions taken via the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, AWS Command-Line Interface, and APIs. 

3. AWS Security Hub 
AWS Security Hub provides a central place for creating security alerts and data from all ranges of AWS security services. The AWS Security Hub pulls data from AWS Guard Duty, Amazon Macie, and Amazon Inspector, inspects the information, and automatically reports on any suspicious behavior.  A dashboard is used to organize the issues found.

4. AWS Inspector 
Amazon Inspector tool helps detect and automate vulnerability management at any scale. This tool ingests and analyzes data continuously from over 50 sources and scans workloads continually. 

Also, AWS Inspector scans support compliance standards and best practices for industry standards, such as PCI DSS. 

5. AWS Config 
AWS Config continually assesses, audits, and evaluates the configurations and relationships of resources on AWS, on premises, and other clouds. 

Best Third-Party Monitoring Tools 

1. Datadog–Hybrid Cloud Monitoring 
Datadog is a viable option for organizations looking for a monitoring tool that consolidates AWS and Azure data into a single and centralized platform. 

It can monitor servers, apps, metrics, clouds, and full DevOps stacks. It can also monitor security, network, performance, and real users in your AWS or hybrid environment. 

2. Splunk Monitoring Tool 
It is a full-stack, real-time, analytics-driven monitoring tool for AWS. 

Splunk checks all the insights in one place. Its observability simplifies the monitoring of your AWS and hybrid cloud environment, removing complexity from the process. Gain complete and instant visibility with contextual insights across your infrastructure, applications, and customer experience to identify and address issues before customers notice. Additionally, understand where to look when problems occur.

3. Dynatrace – Native/Hybrid Cloud Monitoring Service 
It is a real-time, hybrid cloud monitoring platform with built-in support for multi- AWS services. With Dynatrace One Agent, you get to use byte-code instrumentation for (EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Service, Lambda, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, and AWS Fargate. 

Besides metrics, traces, and logs, it also captures user experience data and check microservices, networks, infrastructure, apps, and security indicators for full, end-to-end AWS visibility.

4. PRTG – Network Monitoring 
PRTG Network Monitor allows tracking of any device, system, app, or traffic across all your IT infrastructure. It also allows for monitoring local networks and all cloud services from anywhere, calculating how much bandwidth the application is using, and identifying sources of bottlenecks. 

PRTG can integrate with a variety of monitoring technologies and comes with great visuals. 

Enhancing AWS Security: The Added Value of Third-Party Tools 

Though AWS provides a robust set of security tools and services, relying solely on them may not be sufficient for several reasons. Third-party security solutions can give additional layers of security and address specific needs that AWS tools may not cover.  

Here we have some reasons why organizations may choose to use third-party security tools in place of AWS offerings: 

• Advanced threat detection and intelligence 
• Support multi-cloud environments 
• Customization and flexibility 
• Endpoint security 
• Security orchestration and automation