AWS Security Monitoring using CloudWatch Agent

AWS Cloud Hands on Lab Practice Series

Elevating Security with AWS CloudWatch Monitoring and Alerts

Project Overview —

This project revolves around AWS SysOps best practices where we configure an Amazon Linux instances to send log files to Amazon CloudWatch and then create Amazon CloudWatch alarms and notifications to alert for a specified number of login failures on our EC2 instances. Finally, we create a CloudWatch alarm and notification to monitor outgoing traffic through a NAT gateway. By leveraging AWS CloudWatch capabilities we stay proactive & cover observability of our AWS Infrastructure.

SOLUTIONS ARCHITECTURE OVERVIEW -

First Let’s understand the real world use case -

• Web Application Security Monitoring — Real-time alerts will help us identify and respond to unauthorized access attempts. Monitoring failed logins across our instances helps us spot potential brute-force attacks. We can take immediate action, such as blocking IP addresses, when CloudWatch alarms trigger.
• Compliance and Auditing for Critical Services — Detailed logs and alerts provide the necessary evidence for compliance audits. We can set up CloudWatch alarms to detect deviations from security and compliance policies in real-time. Notifications can be used to inform security teams or compliance officers when an alarm is triggered, enabling swift remediation.
• Network Traffic Analysis for Cost Optimization-Real-time alerts will help us identify spikes in outgoing traffic that could lead to unexpected AWS data transfer costs. Monitoring traffic patterns allows us to make informed decisions about scaling resources up or down. We can automate scaling actions or adjust your application’s behavior based on traffic trends.
• Application Performance Monitoring-Set up custom CloudWatch dashboards to visualize critical metrics and detect performance bottlenecks. Create CloudWatch alarms to trigger notifications when metrics exceed predefined thresholds, indicating potential performance…