Configuring CloudWatch monitoring and alerts

We are now going to practice a hands-on session where we will set up some CloudWatch metrics, create a dashboard so we can view all the critical metrics in one place, and finally, configure some alarms to send us emails about database issues.

If you do not have any RDS MySQL databases, then please create one. Make sure you configure the security groups to allow you to log in to it, as we will be connecting and generating traffic to trigger alarms. Make sure you request it to send all logs to CloudWatch.

Let's start by creating a CloudWatch dashboard.

Creating a CloudWatch dashboard

Let's create a CloudWatch dashboard that will allow us to monitor all our key metrics in one place. If you have more than one database, you can monitor them all from one dashboard, but in this lab, we only use one database:

1. Log in to the AWS console and navigate to CloudWatch.
2. Click Dashboard, and then click Create dashboard....