The average traffic to your online business has quadrupled since you expanded your targeted marketing campaigns. Your web servers are handling the traffic, but you are closely monitoring your database layer, which consists of multiple Amazon RDS MySQL Databases.
You are monitoring key custom metrics related to read and write throughput and latency using Amazon CloudWatch. You have configured CloudWatch alarms to monitor these custom metrics against optimal performance thresholds, but want to ensure these alarms based on these specific metrics are as responsive as possible.
How can you increase the responsiveness of CloudWatch alarms for the specific custom metrics you have already implemented for your RDS MySQL databases? (Choose 2 answers)
Explanation
Most of these choices improve the responsiveness of CloudWatch in some way, but the aspect of this question is improving the responsiveness of CloudWatch alarms you have already implemented. This means you are not interested in additional metric information outside of the custom metrics you’ve already created in CloudWatch, and any features that increase responsiveness to metrics other than what you want will not be beneficial.
So, creating CloudWatch Log metric filters for default RDS metrics will not help, even though this can provide 1-second granularity, it is unlikely the logs will indicate overall latency and throughput of reads and writes, as these performance metrics are not related to specific API calls, but rather general database performance.
Performance Insights allow you to review and analyze your RDS database performance overall, but is not ideal for identifying a performance issue in real-time.
Enabling Enhanced monitoring does provide increased insight into RDS database performance, and with the increased granularity of 5 seconds instead of 60 seconds, or potentially even 1-second granularity through CloudWatch Log Streams. However, Enhanced Monitoring provides specific operating system metrics and other performance metrics, and would not apply to the custom metric you have created using CloudWatch.
Enabling Detailed Monitoring will increase the delivery of average metrics from every 5 minutes to every minute, and this will apply to your custom metrics as well.
In addition, creating a Route 53 CloudWatch Alarm Health Check will monitor the transmission of data to CloudWatch, and can effectively alert you before the CloudWatch alarm is even triggered.
Explanation
Most of these choices improve the responsiveness of CloudWatch in some way, but the aspect of this question is improving the responsiveness of CloudWatch alarms you have already implemented. This means you are not interested in additional metric information outside of the custom metrics you’ve already created in CloudWatch, and any features that increase responsiveness to metrics other than what you want will not be beneficial.
So, creating CloudWatch Log metric filters for default RDS metrics will not help, even though this can provide 1-second granularity, it is unlikely the logs will indicate overall latency and throughput of reads and writes, as these performance metrics are not related to specific API calls, but rather general database performance.
Performance Insights allow you to review and analyze your RDS database performance overall, but is not ideal for identifying a performance issue in real-time.
Enabling Enhanced monitoring does provide increased insight into RDS database performance, and with the increased granularity of 5 seconds instead of 60 seconds, or potentially even 1-second granularity through CloudWatch Log Streams. However, Enhanced Monitoring provides specific operating system metrics and other performance metrics, and would not apply to the custom metric you have created using CloudWatch.
Enabling Detailed Monitoring will increase the delivery of average metrics from every 5 minutes to every minute, and this will apply to your custom metrics as well.
In addition, creating a Route 53 CloudWatch Alarm Health Check will monitor the transmission of data to CloudWatch, and can effectively alert you before the CloudWatch alarm is even triggered.