In this video, you’ll see how to create a custom dashboard and alerts for AWS
Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS).
With this solution, you can create an Amazon CloudWatch dashboard to
monitor the health of your DRS environment, and set up email alerts for your DRS resources.
To get started, let’s navigate to CloudWatch and start creating a custom dashboard.
For the purposes of this video, we already have some replicated DRS servers we can use.
Let’s give it the name of DRS-Health-Dashboard.
Our CloudWatch custom dashboard was created successfully.
Now let’s add some widgets to it.
The Line widget lets us compare metrics over time.
We’ll select the Metrics data source, and then configure the widget for DRS.
We’ll configure the metrics by source server.
These are all the source servers DRS is installed on.
Let’s search for and select LagDuration.
This metric measures the time in seconds since the server was last in
Continuous Data Protection (CDP) mode.
We’ll include all the source server results when creating the widget.
Let’s add another widget.
Let’s search for and select Backlog.
This metric measures the amount of data yet to be synced, in bytes.
Again, we'll include all source server results when creating the widget.
Let’s add a third widget.
This time, we’ll choose EC2 metrics.
Let’s select Per-Instance Metrics.
We’ll select NetworkIn metrics.
This is a useful metric to determine if the incoming bytes are too high
for your replication server.
In that case, a server instance size upgrade would be recommended.
We’ll sort by instance name and select our DRS replication servers.
Next, let’s add a widget for CPU utilization.
Again, we’ll select EC2 and Per-Instance Metrics.
Let’s search for and select CPUUtilization.
We’ll again sort by instance name and select our DRS replication servers.
Let’s add one more widget that will show the amount of available I/O
for our replication servers.
Again, we’ll select EC2 and Per-Instance Metrics.
We’ll search for and add EBSIO-Balance%.
A low EBSIO-Balance could signify a replication server disk type is too
slow and needs an upgrade.
We’ll sort by instance name and select our DRS replication servers.
We’ve now created our custom CloudWatch dashboard.
We can filter the data using the settings at the top of the page.
We can also resize the tiles.
Let’s save what we’ve done so far.
Next, let’s navigate to the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) page
and create a topic for DRS replication monitoring.
Let’s name the topic DRS-Replication-Monitoring.
We’ll use the Standard option in order to receive e-mail notifications.
Let’s keep the other default settings but add a tag, which is optional.
We’ll give it a value of DRS.
Let’s create the topic.
Now we’ll create a topic subscription.
Let’s choose the email protocol and add a test email address.
Now we can create our subscription.
An email will be sent to our test email address to confirm our subscription.
Once the subscription has been confirmed via email, the status will update to “Confirmed.”
Next, let’s link our SNS topic to an event through Amazon EventBridge.
We’ll create a new rule.
Let’s give it the name of DRS-replication- monitoring and build an event pattern.
Our event pattern will default to AWS events.
Let’s skip the sample event and go directly to the event pattern.
We’ll leave AWS services selected for the event source.
Next, we’ll select Elastic Disaster Recovery Service as the AWS service to use.
For the event type, we’ll select DRS Source Server Data Replication Stalled Change.
Next, we’ll select a target type of SNS Topic and specify the topic we just created.
We’ll skip the configure tags section and proceed to review
the rule we have been working on.
Let’s create the rule.
This EventBridge rule will now invoke an SNS topic email when a DRS
replication server is in a stalled state.
Finally, let’s return to the CloudWatch Elastic Disaster Recovery dashboard we created.
We’re receiving DRS data through our custom dashboard, ensuring we are up
to date with the health of our environment and can make proactive adjustments as needed.
You’ve just seen how to create a custom dashboard and alerts for
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery.
You can learn more about this topic in the description and links for this video.
Thanks for watching. Now it's your turn to try.