Load Balancing in the Cloud

Chapter 6. Monitoring NLBs and NGINX Plus

Monitoring your application is almost as important as building it, because monitoring provides the measurement for successfully maintaining and adjusting systems and applications. As the systems world gets more and more automated, good monitoring is indispensable, as the metrics collected by monitoring serve as the basis for automated responses. In order to be able to automate responses to changes in your application stack, you must collect metrics. The more metrics you collect, the more informed your automated responses can be. This chapter demonstrates different ways to monitor the AWS Network Load Balancer, and our example software load balancer NGINX and NGINX Plus.

CloudWatch for Monitoring

AWS’s native monitoring solution is called CloudWatch. CloudWatch ingests metrics and is able to do basic aggregates of the metrics collected. With CloudWatch you can also trigger alerts based on gathered metrics. CloudWatch is one of the most integrated solutions in AWS, almost all of the other services natively send metrics to CloudWatch automatically, including the NLB. CloudWatch alarms are also well connected and are able to trigger a number of actions across the platform. Let’s look at how to monitor the AWS NLB with CloudWatch.

Amazon automatically pushes metrics for the majority of their services to CloudWatch, and also allows you to build your own metric collectors for any metric you may want to collect. The Network Load Balancer sends ...