When you first onboard to a monitoring and security platform, it can be difficult to know where to start. Which services should you monitor? What thresholds should you set? How often should you alert your team, and where’s the best starting point for investigations? Datadog simplifies this process—providing more than 700 built-in integrations for the quick, convenient unification of all your systems, out-of-the-box dashboards for troubleshooting, and preconfigured alerts with Recommended Monitors for proactive monitoring.
Our Recommended Monitors provide you with alert queries and thresholds for a variety of services, allowing you to get started with confidence in minutes. Each Recommended Monitor is preconfigured based on the firsthand expertise and feedback of our own internal teams, technology partners, and thousands of customers, so you can be assured that any issues within your environment will be brought to your attention at the right time.
To expand our commitment to simplified alerting, we’re pleased to introduce our Recommended Monitors for AWS, created to help you thoroughly monitor the AWS cloud services that are most used by our customers. We currently provide Recommended Monitors for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), AWS Lambda, and Amazon Simple Query Service (SQS). Our AWS Recommended Monitors adhere to the service monitoring guidelines dictated by AWS and our alerting best practices, meaning that each one will be preventative, contextual, and actionable.
In this post, we’ll discuss where to start with AWS Recommended Monitors, cover a few use cases that will help you understand their value, and explain how they can assist you in maintaining the health of your AWS environment.
Start monitoring your AWS resources at scale in minutes
Once you have installed any AWS integration that has a Recommended Monitor, you can enable each corresponding monitor within Datadog to immediately start receiving alerts that will inform you of AWS resource performance. For example, if you want to verify that your EC2 instances can adequately handle your workload demand, our CPU utilization monitor has prefilled queries and thresholds in place that can help you rebalance your workloads before an issue disrupts your environment.
Use Monitor Summary widgets to add the AWS Recommended Monitors that you’re using to our out-of-the-box dashboards, allowing you to easily access a variety of metrics from one convenient location within Datadog. We have created out-of-the-box dashboards for many AWS cloud services, including EC2, RDS, and Lambda, so you can troubleshoot effectively with the insightful data that you need to resolve investigations, remediate issues, and prevent future disruptions to production.
In addition to threshold alerts, AWS Recommended Monitors can also include machine learning-powered anomaly detection, notifying you of activity that deviates from the normal pattern. For example, if you enable the anomaly detection monitor for RDS database connections, you’ll be notified any time the number of database connections fell outside of the normal pattern for a 15-minute time period. In this use case, it would be helpful to leverage our RDS out-of-the-box dashboard to see your historical workload patterns. Then, you can customize the monitor’s time period, alert and warning thresholds, escalation policies for notification, add additional queries and formulas, or modify other specifications of the monitor so that it properly fits your needs.
To keep track of the health and status of your AWS resources, you can enable AWS Recommended Monitors that will check if your workloads are performing well and available, and that processing time and utilization are meeting or exceeding your resource response time expectations. For a comprehensive list of AWS Recommended Monitors, visit the Datadog monitor library.
Get notified and take action today
With AWS Recommended Monitors, you’ll have out-of-the-box access to the best monitoring practices for the services in your system, so you can incorporate actionable alerts into your monitoring workflow within minutes of installing your AWS integrations. We design Recommended Monitors to save you time and effort, eliminate the complexities of configuration, and simplify the Datadog onboarding process so that you can focus your energy on the tasks that matter most.
Check out our documentation for more information about getting started. If you’re using Azure, check out our blog post about Recommended Monitors for Azure. And if you’re new to Datadog, you can get started with a 14-day free trial.
