AWS Administration – The Definitive Guide

Recommendations and best practices

The following are some key recommendations and best practices to keep in mind when working with CloudWatch:

• Create a monitoring plan for your infrastructure and abide by it. Note down all the metrics that you need to collect along with the method of its collection before actually deploying your infrastructure on the cloud.
• Monitor each and every aspect of your infrastructure, including EC2 instances, EBS volumes, Elastic Load Balancers, and so on. Create specific alarms for monitoring each AWS resource independently
• Avoid storing secret and access keys in your instances, and instead create and use specific IAM roles for permitting the instances to communicate with CloudWatch.
• Create and check log files periodically ...