Monitor all components of the workload to detect failures

Monitoring is critical for maintaining workload resilience. By constantly assessing the health of each component, organizations can detect issues early, ensuring minimal disruptions and enabling swift recovery, thus supporting high availability and reducing mean time to recovery (MTTR).

Best Practices

Implement Comprehensive Monitoring Solutions

• Utilize AWS services like Amazon CloudWatch for real-time monitoring of your applications and resources. Set up alarms and dashboards to track metrics that reflect the health and performance of your workloads.
• Integrate third-party monitoring tools if needed, to enhance visibility, especially for applications spanning multiple cloud environments or hybrid setups.
• Define key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to your business objectives, ensuring that your monitoring setup prioritizes critical application components and user impact.
• Establish rigorous logging practices across all components, enabling you to capture detailed information during failures for root cause analysis and ongoing improvement.
• Regularly review and adjust monitoring thresholds and alarms based on evolving workload demands and prior incidents to ensure continued effectiveness.

Questions to ask your team

• What monitoring tools are currently in place to track the performance of your workload components?
• How frequently do you review the health metrics of your workload?
• What key performance indicators (KPIs) are being monitored to ensure your workload is operating optimally?
• How are you alerted when a failure or degradation is detected in your workload?
• What processes are in place for automated responses to component failures?
• Have you conducted any drills or tests to verify the effectiveness of your monitoring systems?

Who should be doing this?

Cloud Architect

• Design resilient architectures that incorporate monitoring capabilities.
• Define key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to the workload’s business value.
• Implement strategies for high availability and automated recovery in the architecture.

DevOps Engineer

• Set up monitoring tools to track the health of all components of the workload.
• Automate alerts for failures or performance degradations.
• Collaborate with the cloud architect to ensure alignment on monitoring strategies.

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

• Continuously monitor system performance and reliability.
• Analyze incidents to identify root causes and improve monitoring practices.
• Maintain documentation for monitoring processes and ensure they are up to date.

Product Owner

• Define business value metrics that inform the monitoring strategy.
• Prioritize features and fixes that enhance reliability based on monitoring data.
• Communicate the importance of reliability and monitoring to stakeholders.

What evidence shows this is happening in your organization?

• System Health Monitoring Dashboard: A real-time dashboard displaying the health status and key performance indicators (KPIs) of all workload components. It includes alerts for failures and degradations, enabling quick response and resolution.
• Incident Response Playbook: A structured playbook outlining the steps to take when a component failure is detected. This document includes identifying responsible teams, escalation paths, and recovery procedures to minimize downtime.
• Monitoring and Alerting Policy: A formal policy defining monitoring requirements for all workload components. It specifies which KPIs to monitor, appropriate thresholds for alerts, and procedures for escalation when issues are detected.
• Monthly Reliability Report: A comprehensive report summarizing the performance and reliability of the workload over the past month. It details incidents, recovery times, and trends in failures to guide future improvements and optimizations.
• Checklist for Monitoring Implementation: A detailed checklist to ensure that all components of the workload are monitored properly. This checklist includes tasks such as configuring metrics, setting up alerts, and testing automated response mechanisms.

Cloud Services

AWS

• Amazon CloudWatch: A monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and applications that provides data and actionable insights to monitor performance and resource utilization.
• AWS X-Ray: Helps developers analyze and debug production applications, providing insights into application performance and monitoring requests.
• AWS CloudTrail: Enables governance, compliance, and operational and risk auditing of your AWS account by logging API calls made on your account.

Azure

• Azure Monitor: Provides full-stack monitoring for applications, infrastructure, and network, enabling proactive measures based on insights.
• Azure Application Insights: A feature of Azure Monitor that provides powerful analytics tools to help you diagnose issues and understand what users actually do with your apps.
• Azure Log Analytics: Collects and analyzes log data from various sources, providing operational insights for your applications and infrastructure.

Google Cloud Platform

• Google Cloud Monitoring: Monitoring service that provides visibility into your applications and resources, allowing you to set up custom metrics and alerts.
• Google Cloud Logging: A service that allows you to store, search, analyze, and alert on log data from your applications and services on Google Cloud.
• Stackdriver Error Reporting: A service that displays and allows you to filter errors from your applications, helping in identifying and resolving issues quickly.