Use PRTG to Monitor Amazon Cloudwatch

As cloud hosting is becoming more and more popular, the importance of monitoring your cloud servers increases. Amazon CloudWatch is a web service which offers monitoring for AWS cloud resources. CloudWatch shows users of Amazon EC2 factors such as resource utilization, operational performance, and overall demand patterns (including CPU utilization, disk reads and writes, and network traffic).

How can I Monitor Amazon Cloudwatch Using PRTG?

PRTG Network Monitor has a built-in CloudWatch sensor, which enables you to easily integrate Amazon CloudWatch into your complete network monitoring solution.

Advantages of Using Cloudwatch

Of course, instead of using the Amazon CloudWatch service, PRTG could also monitor the cloud server "from the inside" by monitoring from the "guest operating system" itself. However, using CloudWatch has two advantages:

• Operating system independence: You can monitor the vital system parameters regardless of the operating system running on the cloud server.
• More security: You don't need to open any ports for monitoring requests.

PRTG Network Monitor

PRTG is Paessler's comprehensive network monitoring solution. Apart from monitoring Amazon Cloudwatch, the bandwidth and availability monitoring software gives you a complete overview of your network, enabling you to monitor the performance and availability of network devices, and to track bandwidth usage. PRTG offers more than 130 different sensor types, e.g.

• SNMP, WMI, and NetFlow sensors as well as packet sniffers for bandwidth monitoring
• A number of SNMP and WMI sensors to monitor process CPU, free disk space, etc.
• POP, SMTP and Microsoft Exchange sensors for email monitoring
• Special sensor which allow you to monitor hyper-V, VMware and other virtual machines, as well as the Amazon Cloudwatch sensor
• A QoS sensor for VoIP monitoring, which checks metrics such as delay, jitter, packet loss, and latenc
• Several HTTP sensors for web server monitoring
• SNMP Trap Receiver sensor, which collects and processes SNMP Traps in one central place, converting your installation of PRTG into an SNMP Trap server