Using an Internet Monitor monitor
There are several ways to use an Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor monitor after you create it: for example, you can view information in the CloudWatch dashboard, get information by using the Amazon Command Line Interface, and set health alerts.
Your monitor provides information about your application and configuration preferences so that Internet Monitor can customize measurements and metrics to publish in events for you. Internet Monitor collects measurements from the global infrastructure footprint for Amazon. These measurements are a tremendous amount of network performance and availability information, from all over the world. By using information from the resources that you add for your application, Internet Monitor publishes performance and availability measurements for you that is scoped to the city-networks (that is, client locations and ASNs, typically internet service providers or ISPs) where your application is active. So, the measurements and metrics in the Internet Monitor dashboard and in CloudWatch Logs —about availability, performance, monitored bytes transferred, and round-trip time—are specific to your client locations and ASNs.
Internet Monitor also determines when there are anomalies in performance and availability. By default, Internet Monitor overlays your traffic with the availability and performance measurements that Amazon has collected for each source-destination pair in your client locations, to determine when there are notable drops in performance or availability. When there's significant degradation for your application's locations and scope, Internet Monitor generates a health event, and publishes information about the issue to your monitor.
After you create a monitor, you can use it to access or be alerted to the information that Internet Monitor provides, in the following ways:
Use the CloudWatch dashboard to view and explore performance, availability, and health events; explore your application's historical data; and get insights into new ways to configure your application for better performance. To learn more, see the following:
Configure health event thresholds to change what triggers Internet Monitor to create a health event for your application. You can configure overall thresholds and local (city-network) thresholds. To learn more, see Change health event thresholds.
Use Amazon CLI commands with Internet Monitor API actions to view traffic profile information, view measurements, list health events, and so on. To learn more, see Examples of using the CLI with Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor.
Use standard CloudWatch tools, such as CloudWatch Contributor Insights, CloudWatch Metrics explorer, and CloudWatch Logs Insights to visualize the data in CloudWatch. To learn more, see Exploring your data with CloudWatch tools and the Internet Monitor query interface.
Use Athena with S3 logs to access and analyze Internet Monitor internet measurements for your application, if you turned on publishing measurements to S3.
Create Amazon EventBridge notifications to alert you when Internet Monitor determines there is a health event. To learn more, see Using Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor with Amazon EventBridge.
Receive an Amazon Health Dashboard notification automatically, when Internet Monitor determines that an issue is caused by the Amazon network. The notification includes the steps that Amazon is taking to mitigate the problem.