Amazon has launched a new metric within its CloudWatch service, named Attached EBS Status Check, to monitor the accessibility and I/O operation capability of Amazon EBS volumes connected to EC2 instances. This addition aims to help users swiftly identify and address any issues with EBS volumes that could affect the performance of applications running on EC2 instances.
The Attached EBS Status Check metric can be monitored using CloudWatch alarms. It is offered at a default frequency of one minute and comes at no extra cost. The metric is compatible with all EC2 Nitro instances and is available in all public AWS regions as well as GovCloud regions.
What is Amazon CloudWatch?
Amazon CloudWatch serves as a comprehensive monitoring and management service, offering data and insights for resources across AWS, on-premises, hybrid, and other cloud environments. Unlike traditional monitoring solutions that operate in isolated silos, CloudWatch consolidates performance and operational data in the form of logs and metrics into a single platform. This enables holistic monitoring of your entire stack, including applications, infrastructure, network, and services.
The service allows you to set alarms, analyze logs, and use event data to automate actions, thereby reducing the mean time to resolution (MTTR) of issues. This automation capability frees up valuable resources, allowing teams to concentrate on application development and delivering business value.
CloudWatch provides granular visibility into metrics and log data, with up to one-second intervals for metrics and a data retention period of 15 months. This level of detail supports both real-time analysis for immediate optimization and historical analysis for longer-term cost management.
For those managing containerized applications and microservices, CloudWatch Container Insights is particularly useful. It monitors, troubleshoots, and sets alerts for your container environments. The service collects and summarizes key performance indicators like CPU, memory, disk, and network usage, as well as diagnostic data such as container restart failures. This helps DevOps engineers quickly identify and resolve issues. Container Insights supports various container management services, including Amazon ECS for Kubernetes (EKS), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), AWS Fargate, and standalone Kubernetes (k8s).