Measuring performance across Amazon EC2 instances
Blog post from New Relic
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a widely used cloud computing service that provides scalable virtual servers, known as compute instances, for application development and deployment in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. While Amazon CloudWatch offers basic monitoring capabilities for EC2 instances, such as CPU, disk usage, and networking metrics, it does not provide comprehensive insights into application performance metrics like latency and error rates. To achieve full observability, users are encouraged to integrate platforms like New Relic, which offer advanced monitoring tools such as application performance monitoring (APM) and real user monitoring. These tools not only provide detailed insights into the performance and health of applications running on EC2 instances but also facilitate rightsizing, which helps in optimizing resource usage and cloud spend. A well-structured monitoring plan includes setting service level objectives, designating monitoring responsibilities, and establishing alert mechanisms to ensure efficient management of EC2 resources. New Relic's integration with AWS allows it to automatically instrument EC2 instances, providing a unified view of application and infrastructure metrics, thereby enhancing troubleshooting and optimization capabilities.