Content Domain 4: Monitoring and Logging - AWS Certification

Content Domain 4: Monitoring and Logging

Task Statement 4.1: Configure the collection, aggregation, and storage of logs and metrics.

Knowledge of:

  • How to monitor applications and infrastructure

  • Amazon CloudWatch metrics (for example, namespaces, metrics, dimensions, and resolution)

  • Real-time log ingestion

  • Encryption options for at-rest and in-transit logs and metrics (for example, client-side and server-side, AWS Key Management Service [AWS KMS])

  • Security configurations (for example, IAM roles and permissions to allow for log collection)

Skills in:

  • Securely storing and managing logs

  • Creating CloudWatch metrics from log events by using metric filters

  • Creating CloudWatch metric streams (for example, Amazon S3 or Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose options)

  • Collecting custom metrics (for example, using the CloudWatch agent)

  • Managing log storage lifecycles (for example, Amazon S3 lifecycles, CloudWatch log group retention)

  • Processing log data by using CloudWatch log subscriptions (for example, Amazon Kinesis, AWS Lambda, Amazon OpenSearch Service)

  • Searching log data by using filter and pattern syntax or Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights

  • Configuring encryption of log data (for example, AWS KMS)

Task Statement 4.2: Audit, monitor, and analyze logs and metrics to detect issues.

Knowledge of:

  • Anomaly detection alarms (for example, CloudWatch anomaly detection)

  • Common CloudWatch metrics and logs (for example, CPU utilization with Amazon EC2, queue length with Amazon RDS, 5xx errors with an Application Load Balancer [ALB])

  • Amazon Inspector and common assessment templates

  • AWS Config rules

  • AWS CloudTrail log events

Skills in:

  • Building CloudWatch dashboards and Amazon QuickSight visualizations

  • Associating CloudWatch alarms with CloudWatch metrics (standard and custom)

  • Configuring AWS X-Ray for different services (for example, containers, Amazon API Gateway, Lambda)

  • Analyzing real-time log streams (for example, using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams)

  • Analyzing logs with AWS services (for example, Amazon Athena, CloudWatch Logs Insights)

Task Statement 4.3: Automate monitoring and event management of complex environments.

Knowledge of:

  • Event-driven, asynchronous design patterns (for example, S3 Event Notifications or Amazon EventBridge events to Amazon Simple Notification Service [Amazon SNS] or Lambda)

  • Capabilities of auto scaling for a variety of AWS services (for example, EC2 Auto Scaling groups, RDS storage auto scaling, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic Container Service [Amazon ECS] capacity provider, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service [Amazon EKS] autoscalers)

  • Alert notification and action capabilities (for example, CloudWatch alarms to Amazon SNS, Lambda, EC2 automatic recovery)

  • Health check capabilities in AWS services (for example, ALB target groups, Amazon Route 53)

Skills in:

  • Configuring solutions for auto scaling (for example, DynamoDB, EC2 Auto Scaling groups, RDS storage auto scaling, ECS capacity provider)

  • Creating CloudWatch custom metrics and metric filters, alarms, and notifications (for example, Amazon SNS, Lambda)

  • Configuring S3 events to process log files (for example, by using Lambda) and deliver log files to another destination (for example, OpenSearch Service, CloudWatch Logs)

  • Configuring EventBridge to send notifications based on a particular event pattern

  • Installing and configuring agents on EC2 instances (for example, AWS Systems Manager Agent [SSM Agent], CloudWatch agent)

  • Configuring AWS Config rules to remediate issues

  • Configuring health checks (for example, Route 53, ALB)