Amazon today announced that all EC2 instances would be eligible for free monitoring via their EC2 monitoring service called CloudWatch.  This free service allows customers to get monitoring metrics on their services in 5 minute increments.  Customers can in almost real time and historically view metrics such as CPU, Disk Reads, Disk Writes, and network utilization.  Customers can continue to use a paid service that allows for monitoring in 1 minute increments.  As any system engineer can tell you, monitoring your resources is absolutely critical for a healthy IT environment.

I have found the CloudWatch service to be very useful in the regard that it lets you accurately track all these resources and historically see what has happened.  We’ve used the CloudWatch service here at TyphoonTools to monitor our server load and launch additional servers as required to keep up with traffic.  When traffic goes back down, our server instances are decreased thus keeping our costs load and only paying for what we need.

Personally, a long sought after feature I wanted to see was the ability to send email notifications in case of a change in state or threshold exceeded.  Amazon has now added this ability and we look forward to investigating it.  I hope they continue to expand this monitoring offering into the future as well.