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Adem John
Adem John

Posted on • Originally published at dev.to

Common Problems With Native AWS Monitoring Software

Over 1 Million organizations globally use Amazon Web Services to host applications and data. However, most of these organizations face significant challenges while monitoring their AWS using naive AWS monitoring software. While AWS does make it convenient to deploy cloud services, collecting and analyzing the data gathered from AWS is a highly complicated task.

In public cloud services like AWS, the cloud vendor manages and oversees most cloud services with their native AWS monitoring, tempting users to assume they can relieve themselves of any monitoring duties. This generally proves to be a costly error for the users as even the best-managed cloud services can go amiss. There are several reasons for this - it could be a problem on the vendor side, such as a temporary downtime or from the users' side, where improper capacity planning can lead to several performance issues. If AWS services are not monitored effectively, companies risk overspending and underutilize their critical resources.

Native AWS Monitoring software are effective, but they are not complete in itself. Below we'll explore some of the most critical challenges users may face while monitoring their AWS resources using native cloud monitoring.

Fragmentation
AWS native cloud monitoring does not offer a centralized monitoring tool to collect and analyze all AWS services on a single platform. Users often juggle multiple monitoring tools to monitor different AWS services, including metrics and logs from their AWS cloud services to a single place where they can be monitored.

Inadequate Analytics
The users of native AWS monitoring software get little in the way of analytics. Even though tools such as CloudWatch can be used to view graphs and dashboards, for deeper visibility into AWS services, CloudWatch isn't sufficient.

Data Consumption
One of the biggest challenges users typically face with native AWS monitoring software is to get the monitoring data in AWS' native tools. Users need to pass the data through Kinesis, which is further passed on to Lambda functions and then into an S3 bucket before the users can access and use the data. While this data movement isn't complicated to manage, it can spike cloud costs because AWS charges for all these services.

Data Storage
Storing data persistently is another common challenge associated with native AWS monitoring software. Containers, applications, and serverless functions are deployed in the cloud using a rigid infrastructure model which does not have a permanent storage option. Instead of storing data in the application environment, native cloud monitoring software stores the data externally, and the data is exposed as a service. All the internal data is destroyed when the application shuts down. This makes data storage a persistent challenge when using native AWS monitoring software.

Is There A Better Way?
While native AWS monitoring has several challenges, there are other ways to monitor AWS resources effectively. Instead of depending upon a tangled web of disparate services, users can ingest all their data from all their services in a single platform using the monitoring services by eG Innovations. Additionally, you can get a free trial of 30-days which can help you evaluate their performance and make the final purchasing decision accordingly.

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