What is Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights?

CloudWatch Application Insights helps you monitor your applications that use Amazon EC2 instances along with other application resources. It identifies and sets up key metrics, logs, and alarms across your application resources and technology stack (for example, your Microsoft SQL Server database, web (IIS) and application servers, OS, load balancers, and queues). It continuously monitors metrics and logs to detect and correlate anomalies and errors. When errors and anomalies are detected, Application Insights generates CloudWatch Events that you can use to set up notifications or take actions. To assist with troubleshooting, it creates automated dashboards for detected problems, which include correlated metric anomalies and log errors, along with additional insights to point you to a potential root cause. The automated dashboards help you to take remedial actions to keep your applications healthy and to prevent impact to the end-users of your application. It also creates OpsItems so that you can resolve problems using AWS SSM OpsCenter.

You can configure important counters, such as Mirrored Write Transaction/sec, Recovery Queue Length, and Transaction Delay, as well as Windows Event Logs on CloudWatch. When a failover event or problem occurs with your SQL HA workload, such as a restricted access to query a target database, CloudWatch Application Insights provides automated insights .

CloudWatch Application Insights integrates with AWS Launch Wizard to provide a one-click monitoring setup experience for deploying SQL Server HA workloads on AWS. When you select the option to set up monitoring and insights with Application Insights on the Launch Wizard console , CloudWatch Application Insights automatically sets up relevant metrics, logs, and alarms on CloudWatch, and starts monitoring newly deployed workloads. You can view automated insights and detected problems, along with the health of your SQL Server HA workloads, on the CloudWatch console.

Contents

Features

Application Insights provides the following features.

Automatic set up of monitors for application resources

CloudWatch Application Insights reduces the time it takes to set up monitoring for your applications. It does this by scanning your application resources, providing a customizable list of recommended metrics and logs, and setting them up on CloudWatch to provide necessary visibility into your application resources, such as Amazon EC2 and Elastic Load Balancers (ELB). It also sets up dynamic alarms on monitored metrics. The alarms are automatically updated based on anomalies detected in the previous two weeks.

Problem detection and notification

CloudWatch Application Insights detects signs of potential problems with your application, such as metric anomalies and log errors. It correlates these observations to surface potential problems with your application. It then generates CloudWatch Events, which can be configured to receive notifications or take actions. This eliminates the need for you to create individual alarms on metrics or log errors.

Troubleshooting

CloudWatch Application Insights creates CloudWatch automatic dashboards for problems that are detected. The dashboards show details about the problem, including the associated metric anomalies and log errors to help you with troubleshooting. They also provide additional insights that point to potential root causes of the anomalies and errors.

Concepts

The following concepts are important for understanding how Application Insights monitors your application.

An auto-grouped, standalone, or custom grouping of similar resources that make up an application. We recommend grouping similar resources into custom components for better monitoring.

Observation

An individual event (metric anomaly, log error, or exception) that is detected with an application or application resource.

Problem

Problems are detected by correlating, classifying, and grouping related observations.

For definitions of other key concepts for CloudWatch Application Insights, see Amazon CloudWatch Concepts.

Pricing

CloudWatch Application Insights sets up recommended metrics and logs for selected application resources using CloudWatch metrics, Logs, and Events for notifications on detected problems. These features are charged to your AWS account according to CloudWatch pricing . For detected problems, SSM OpsItems are also created by Application Insights to notify you about problems. Additionally, Application Insights creates SSM Parameter Store parameters to configure the CloudWatch agents on your instances. The Amazon EC2 Systems Manager features are charged according to SSM pricing . You are not charged for setup assistance, monitoring, data analysis, or problem detection.

Costs for CloudWatch Application Insights

Costs for Amazon EC2 include usage of the following features:

Costs for all resources include usage of the following features:

Example cost calculation

The costs in this example are considered according to the following scenario.

You created a resource group that includes the following:

When you onboard this resource group with CloudWatch Application Insights, the SQL Server workload installed on the Amazon EC2 instance is detected. CloudWatch Application Insights starts monitoring the following metrics.

The following metrics are monitored for the SQL Server instance:

The following metrics are monitored for the volumes attached to the SQL Server instance:

For this scenario, the costs are calculated according to the CloudWatch pricing page and the SSM pricing page:

Related services

The following services are used along with CloudWatch Application Insights:

Related AWS services
Note
Application Insights supports only REST API protocols (v1 of the API Gateway service).
Related third-party services

Supported application components

CloudWatch Application Insights scans your resource group to identify application components. Components can be standalone, auto-grouped (such as instances in an Auto Scaling group or behind a load balancer), or custom (by grouping together individual Amazon EC2 instances).

The following components are supported by CloudWatch Application Insights:

AWS components

Any other component type resources are not currently tracked by CloudWatch Application Insights. If a component type that is supported does not appear in your Application Insights application, the component may already be registered and managed by another application you own that is monitored by Application Insights.

Supported technology stacks

You can use CloudWatch Application Insights to monitor your applications running on Windows Server and Linux operating systems by selecting the application tier dropdown menu option for one of the following technologies:

If none of the technology stacks listed above apply to your application resources, you can monitor your application stack by choosing Custom from the application tier dropdown menu on the Manage monitoring page.