Integrate Amazon CloudWatch with Gmail

Amazon CloudWatch is a cloud computing service that monitors the applications in real time and provides tools to help users react quickly to potential issues. It helps customers in monitoring their application performance and availability by providing real time metrics. By integrating it with Gmail, Google will be able to provide better user experience to its customers.Cloud computing has changed the way we work and live. It has made our lives easier by enabling us to have access to all our data from anywhere. It has given wings to innovation by providing companies the ability to change their business processes quickly in response to market changes. However, due to complexity of managing these services, infrastructure was left on its own. Amazon CloudWatch allows you to monitor your AWS resources, applications, and websites in near real-time. It works with other AWS services such as AWS CloudTrail, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon VPC, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon ElastiCache (EC), and more. Using different metrics provided by Amazon CloudWatch, one can track the performance of applications based on CPU utilization, latency, requests per second, duration of requests, network traffic or any other custom metrics. Users are able to configure rules based on these metrics and get notifications via e-mail or SMS when those metrics cross certain thresholds.Based on the metrics and rules provided by Amazon CloudWatch, applications can be efficiently managed and monitored. The cost of running these applications can also be reduced by optimizing the performance of the applications based on the real-time metrics provided by Amazon Cloud Watch.CloudWatch Dashboard provides an overview of the state of the AWS resources for each account. CloudWatch helps in identifying trends and patterns in the data by providing more advanced mechanisms for filtering, aggregation and querying data. The integration of Gmail with Amazon CloudWatch will help Google to make better use of infrastructure and provide better user experience to its customers.Gmail is a free webmail product from Google that provides users with 1GB of storage space for their e-mails. In order to provide better user experience, Google is continuously improving Gmail and adding new features to it. The recent addition in the Gmail feature list is Priority Inbox which allows Gmail users to filter out the important e-mails from the non-important ones and focus on what they really need to read. Now Google wants to take this feature one step forward and integrate Amazon CloudWatch with Gmail so that it can create a better experience for its users.

What is Amazon CloudWatch?

Amazon CloudWatch is a cloud computing service that provides real time metrics about applications running in AWS. It helps customers in monitoring their application performance and availability by providing real time metrics. Customers can set up alarms based on predefined thresholds that will send notifications when those thresholds are crossed.CloudWatch works with different AWS services including EC2, RDS, EBS, DynamoDB, S3, Redshift and others using which it helps in managing application performance and infrastructure cost efficiently.CloudWatch provides users with two ways of collecting data:

1. Through AWS agents:These are lightweight pieces of software/services running on EC2 instances or instances launched from AMIs that report various attributes of that instance into CloudWatch periodically. These agents are automatically installed and configured during instance launch time or you can install them manually as well. Data reported includes CPU utilization rate, disk I/O rate and network I/O rate among other things depending upon which agent is installed on the instance. Other than EC2 instances, other services like DynamoDB also report their data into CloudWatch through agents.2. Through API calls:CloudWatch receives information about EC2 instances, DynamoDB tables etc using API calls. These calls include information about CPU utilization of EC2 instances, latency statistics of DynamoDB tables and so on. One can also set up alarms based on these statistics. For example, if the latency or errors in a table suddenly increase then one can set up an alarm which would send emails or SMSes when that threshold is crossed.If you want to monitor your application's performance using CloudWatch then you may want to use both these mechanisms simultaneously i.e. collect data through AWS agents as well as through API calls. For example, you may install EC2 agents in your EC2 instances so that you can collect data like CPU utilization and disk I/O rate from them but at the same time use APIs to get data like number of requests per second through them. In this way you can get more accurate results which will help you manage your application more efficiently.CloudWatch stores all the collected data in two broad categories:

1. Metrics:Metrics are discrete numeric values that are collected from various sources like EC2 instances, RDS databases etc. There are various built-in metrics available with different services like EC2 instance metrics, S3 metrics etc but one can also create custom metrics if required using the CloudWatch console or APIs. Custom metrics are specified using simple key value pair format where key represents the metric name while value represents the actual data being collected. Once collected these values are stored in a time series database called 'CloudWatch' which allows them to be queried and displayed graphically using handy graphs and widgets. One can also set up alarms based on these metrics values by defining thresholds at which notifications should be sent as detailed above.2. Alarms. These are notifications about specific events happening in your cloud computing environment which you want your team members or automated scripts to know about instantly or within a range of time you specify (for example, you may want to know if CPU utilization on one of your EC2 instances crosses 90% for 5 minutes. Alarms are triggered when a metric value breaches a threshold that you specify (for example 80% or 90%. and they contain the actual metric value at the moment when they were triggered along with some contextual information like timestamps etc. You can set up alarms for both built-in and custom metrics but there are some limitations like you cannot set up alarms for metrics whose names start with 'cloudwatch' or 'aws/'. Alarms can be triggered only for built-in metrics because it is not possible to define custom thresholds for them i.e., it is not possible to say "if this value goes above 90% then send me an email". You have to specify thresholds for those metrics directly in metric definitions without specifying an alarm rule for them .You have several options for setting up alarms using CloudWatch console or APIs:

• You can define simple alarms based on multiple built-in metrics by specifying their thresholds using simple arithmetic expressions.     Example. If CPUUtilization on my EC2 Instance goes above 80% then send me an Email notification .  2. You can define complex alarms based on multiple built-in metrics by specifying their thresholds using more advanced conditional operators like greater than or equal operator etc.     Example. If CPUUtilization on my EC2 Instance goes above 80% AND latency between my instance's Elastic IP address and EC2 region crosses 500 ms then send me an Email notification . 3. You can define alarms based on any custom metric defined for any service using their unique identifiers.     Example. If CPUUtilization on my MySQl Instance goes above 70% AND latency between my instance's Elastic IP address and EC2 region crosses 500 ms then send me an Email notification . 4. You can define alarms based on any combination of built-in and custom metrics.     Example. If CPUUtilization on my EC2 Instance goes above 80% AND latency between my instance's Elastic IP address and EC2 region crosses 500 ms then send me an Email notification . Note . All these alarms will be sent as e-mails unless you specify otherwise i.e., only e-mails will be sent as notifications unless you specify SMSes or phone calls instead (you cannot specify both. To do so either use AWS CLI or specify e-mail addresses as part of notification recipients when defining alarms using CloudWatch console i.e., select "Email" as notification type when creating alarms then enter e-mail addresses in "Notification Recipients" field under "Alarm Actions" tab.  2. What is Gmail? GMAIL is a free webmail service offered by Google specifically designed for business users who need flexibility in managing their mails easily along with easy access from anywhere at anytime . To provide better user experience Google is continuously improving Gmail and adding new features to it . The recent addition in the Gmail feature list is Priority Inbox which allows Gmail users to filter out the important e-mails from the non-important ones and focus

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