DRHCREL04-BP02 Implement proper monitoring and observability practices to track resource utilization, capacity availability, and application health

Plan and monitor AWS Outposts capacity proactively through right-sizing, forecasting, and CloudWatch metrics to ensure sufficient N+M capacity for high availability.

Desired outcome: Achieve comprehensive observability over hybrid infrastructure and applications, which provides efficient resource allocation, high availability, and consistent adherence to data residency requirements.

Benefits of establishing this best practice: Following observability best practices enables early detection of potential issues and high availability across hybrid environments while maintaining data residency compliance.

Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: High

Implementation guidance

AWS Outposts on-premises has finite capacity. For your workloads to run with high availability, plan your compute and storage capacity ahead of time. Some workloads can also require high network bandwidth or packets per second, which would also require planning to avoid bottlenecks. We recommend right-sizing, benchmarking, and forecasting capacity ahead of time. For guidance on monitoring Outposts capacity, see Monitoring AWS Outposts capacity.

AWS Cloud specialists and Support can assist with right-sizing. The approaches for monitoring Local Zones are the same as Availability Zones in the Region.

For high availability, you can provision additional built-in and always-active capacity on Outposts Rack. Outpost capacity configurations are designed to operate in production environments and support N+M instances for each instance family, where N is the required number of hosts and M is the number of spare hosts provisioned to accommodate failures.

AWS recommends that you allocate sufficient additional capacity for your mission-critical applications to enable recovery and failover if there is an underlying host issue. As a result, capacity planning is very important during the design process. Similarly, it's important to have the right observability in place to allow for fast failover across your resources. You can use Amazon CloudWatch capacity availability metrics and set alarms to monitor the health of your applications, create CloudWatch actions to configure automatic recovery options, and monitor the capacity utilization of your Outposts over time.

Due to the on-premises nature of Outposts, it is important to monitor capacity utilization of both Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS resources across the Outposts to manage capacity, especially if multiple teams are using the Outpost. In addition to the individual resource level capacity CloudWatch metrics, Capacity Exceptions are also populated and detailed in CloudWatch metrics for AWS Outposts.

CloudWatch dashboards are customizable home pages in the CloudWatch console that you can use to monitor your resources in a single view. These dashboards are useful for regular reviews of metrics (for example, weekly) to review trends, which is a best practice highlighted in the Well Architected Framework's Operational Excellence Pillar. For an Outposts-specific CloudWatch dashboard, see Deploying an automated Amazon CloudWatch dashboard for AWS Outposts using AWS CDK.