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GAMEREL03-BP03 Monitor infrastructure events over time to measure impact on player behavior - Games Industry Lens
Implementation guidance

GAMEREL03-BP03 Monitor infrastructure events over time to measure impact on player behavior

Monitor your game server process, game server instance metrics, and game experience metrics to determine the root cause of issues. In addition to monitoring CPU and memory, you can also set up monitoring for network metrics related to network limitations of EC2 instances to alert you of issues such as exceeding bandwidth, packets-per-second, or other network-level issues that may indicate your server resources are under provisioned.

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

Implementation guidance

Use CloudWatch Synthetics to check critical path application functionality for player experience, such as being unable to login or other service impacting issues. For game servers hosted using Amazon GameLift, consider monitoring metrics like:

  • GameServerInterruptions and InstanceInterruptions, which can assist in understanding how limitations in Spot instance availability are impacting your game servers deployed using Spot.

  • ServerProcessAbnormalTerminations, which can be used to detect abnormal terminations in your game server processes.

It is recommended to maintain historical metrics data of your game server reliability. Use this historical data for reporting purposes and join it with other datasets to uncover potential trends and assess the impact on player behavior over time that may be due to game server issues.

Amazon CloudWatch does not retain metrics indefinitely, and the storage resolution of metrics is increased over time, so consider exporting these metrics to cost-effective long-term storage such as Amazon S3. You can configure CloudWatch Metric Streams to automatically deliver your metrics from CloudWatch Regions to your own S3 bucket, where they can be stored long-term in a storage tier such as S3 Intelligent-Tiering and eventually archived using Amazon Glacier. By placing your metrics in Amazon S3, they are readily available to be joined with other datasets in your data lake for interactive querying with Amazon Athena.

Implementation steps

  • Monitor game server, instance, and network metrics, including bandwidth and packet-per-second limits, using Amazon CloudWatch and CloudWatch Synthetics for critical path functionality checks.

  • Track GameLift-specific metrics like GameServerInterruptions and ServerProcessAbnormalTerminations to assess the impact of Spot instance availability and detect abnormal server terminations.

  • Export CloudWatch metrics to Amazon S3 for long-term storage, use cost-effective tiers like S3 Intelligent-Tiering or Glacier, and analyze trends with tools like Amazon Athena.

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