This chapter is an outline. The curriculum, learning objectives and
structure are settled; the prose, diagrams and code are still being written.
What is below is the plan for the chapter, not the chapter.
Lab 16 — Monitor with CloudWatch
Goal
A dashboard and alarms that fire on the right thing.
Setup
To be written — CLI commands and an IaC equivalent for every resource, all prefixed sqs-course-.
Steps
- Build a dashboard with Visible, NotVisible, Age, Sent, Received, Deleted, EmptyReceives
- Generate load and watch each metric move
- Stop the consumers; identify which metrics change and which do not
- Slow the consumers; compare the metric signature with the previous case
- Create an alarm on
ApproximateAgeOfOldestMessage - Create an alarm on DLQ depth > 0
- Emit a custom processing-duration metric and add it to the dashboard
What you should observe
- Stopped consumers and slow consumers produce different signatures
- Age reacts to problems that depth does not
- SQS metrics alone cannot tell you your processing time
Why it happened
To be written — ties each observation back to the mechanism in 17 — Monitoring and Observability.
Experiments to try
To be written — deliberate variations that change the outcome.
Teardown
To be written — every resource created above, in dependency order.
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