Best practices for monitoring and adjusting AWS Global Accelerator settings involve a combination of proactive health checks, detailed logging, real-time metrics monitoring, and traffic management to ensure optimal performance and availability.
Monitoring AWS Global Accelerator
**1. Use Amazon CloudWatch Metrics and Alarms
AWS Global Accelerator automatically publishes key metrics to Amazon CloudWatch as soon as an accelerator is deployed. These metrics include traffic flow, endpoint health, and connection statistics. Monitoring these metrics helps verify that traffic is flowing correctly through the accelerator and to the endpoints. You can create CloudWatch alarms to notify you or trigger automated actions if metrics cross defined thresholds, such as high latency or rejected connections[5][9][11].
**2. Enable Global Accelerator Flow Logs
Flow logs capture detailed records of the IP traffic going to and from the network interfaces in your accelerator. These logs are valuable for troubleshooting connectivity issues, security audits, and understanding traffic patterns. Flow logs are published to Amazon S3 and can be analyzed with tools like Amazon Athena and QuickSight to visualize traffic and diagnose problems[5][12].
**3. Use AWS CloudTrail for API Activity Logging
CloudTrail logs all API calls made to Global Accelerator, including changes to configurations or endpoint groups. This helps track who made changes and when, which is essential for auditing and troubleshooting configuration issues[5].
**4. Monitor Endpoint Health Checks
Configure health checks accurately for all endpoints (such as EC2 instances or load balancers) to ensure Global Accelerator routes traffic only to healthy endpoints. Health checks should be tailored to the applicationâs specific health indicators, such as HTTP status codes or TCP connectivity. Misconfigured health checks can cause traffic to be routed incorrectly or endpoints to be marked unhealthy erroneously[8][11].
Adjusting AWS Global Accelerator Settings
**1. Manage Endpoint Groups and Traffic Dial
Global Accelerator allows you to configure multiple endpoint groups across different AWS Regions. Adjust the traffic dial settings to control the percentage of traffic routed to each region, enabling gradual rollouts, failover, or load balancing across regions. Regularly review and adjust these settings based on performance data and regional availability[8][11].
**2. Use Port Overrides When Necessary
By default, Global Accelerator routes traffic on the same ports as specified in the listener configuration. However, you can use port overrides to remap listener ports to different destination ports on your endpoints. This is useful to avoid port collisions when the same endpoint serves traffic from multiple accelerators or direct internet traffic. For example, remapping from port 443 to 8443 on an Application Load Balancer helps differentiate traffic sources and prevent connection collisions[4].
**3. Optimize for Performance with TCP Termination at the Edge
Enable TCP termination at AWS edge locations to reduce connection setup latency. This feature establishes a TCP connection between the client and the edge location, and a separate optimized connection from the edge to the endpoint over the AWS global network. This can improve throughput by up to 60% and reduce jitter and latency for end users[7].
**4. Regularly Test Connectivity and Latency
Use tools like curl or wget to test connectivity to your Global Accelerator endpoints from various regions. Conduct latency measurements to identify any regional performance issues or endpoint bottlenecks. This helps in fine-tuning endpoint group configurations and traffic dials[11].
**5. Review Security Group and Network ACL Settings
Ensure that Elastic Network Interfaces (ENIs) associated with Global Accelerator endpoints have appropriate security group and network ACL configurations. This is crucial when client IP address preservation is enabled, to avoid traffic being blocked or dropped[6].
**6. Keep Configurations Updated and Validate DNS Settings
Verify that DNS records point correctly to the static IP addresses provided by Global Accelerator. Keep your accelerator configuration up to date, and consider recreating the accelerator if you suspect configuration corruption or persistent issues[11].
By combining these monitoring and adjustment practices, you can maintain high availability, optimize performance, and quickly troubleshoot issues in your AWS Global Accelerator deployment.
Citations:
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/latest/dg/monitoring-global-accelerator.html
[2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/latest/dg/logging-and-monitoring.html
[3] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/best-practices-for-deployment-with-aws-global-accelerator/
[4] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/measuring-aws-global-accelerator-performance-and-analyzing-results/
[5] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/en_us/global-accelerator/latest/dg/logging-and-monitoring.html
[6] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/latest/dg/best-practices-aga.html
[7] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/achieve-up-to-60-better-performance-for-internet-traffic-with-aws-global-accelerator/
[8] https://www.applify.co/blog/what-is-aws-global-accelerator
[9] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/latest/dg/cloudwatch-monitoring.html
[10] https://cloudvisor.co/aws-guides/aws-global-accelerator/
[11] https://repost.aws/questions/QUuNiUCKYUSkKScntMG8MMeA/timeout-aws-global-accelerator
[12] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/latest/dg/monitoring-global-accelerator.flow-logs.html