To use Cloud Monitoring to identify latency issues in AWS Global Accelerator, you can leverage Amazon CloudWatch metrics and related tools as follows:
1. Monitor CloudWatch Metrics for Global Accelerator
- AWS Global Accelerator automatically publishes metrics to Amazon CloudWatch in the US West (Oregon) region (us-west-2), so you need to view metrics specifically in that region regardless of where your accelerator is deployed[2].
- Key CloudWatch metrics to focus on include:
- Latency: Measures the time taken for traffic to be routed through the Global Accelerator to your endpoints.
- Healthy/Unhealthy Endpoint Counts: To verify if endpoints are healthy or causing delays.
- Traffic Volume and Error Rates: To correlate spikes in latency with traffic patterns or errors[2].
- These real-time metrics can help you detect when latency increases beyond normal thresholds, signaling potential network or endpoint issues.
2. Set Up CloudWatch Alarms
- Create alarms on latency metrics to get notified immediately when latency crosses a predefined threshold, enabling prompt investigation and remediation[2].
3. Use Flow Logs for Detailed Traffic Analysis
- Enable Global Accelerator flow logs to capture detailed information about the traffic entering and leaving the accelerator[2].
- Flow logs provide insights into packet-level details, which can help diagnose reachability or routing issues that might cause latency.
- Note that flow logs require setup and storage in Amazon S3.
4. Analyze Round-Trip Time (RTT) and Packet Loss
- Use network diagnostic tools such as ping and traceroute from client locations to the Global Accelerator endpoints to measure RTT and packet loss[1].
- High RTT or packet loss can indicate network congestion or routing inefficiencies contributing to latency.
- AWS recommends using TCP echo with traceroute to bypass common firewall filters and get accurate hop-by-hop latency measurements[1].
- Collect measurements periodically (e.g., every 5 minutes over an hour) to observe latency trends and identify problematic network segments.
5. Correlate Endpoint Health and Latency
- Global Accelerator continuously monitors endpoint health and reroutes traffic away from unhealthy endpoints within about a minute[8].
- If latency issues coincide with endpoint health degradation, investigate the backend services or load balancers for performance bottlenecks.
6. Use AWS CloudTrail for API Activity Auditing
- CloudTrail logs Global Accelerator API calls, which can help correlate configuration changes or deployments with latency spikes[2].
Summary
By combining CloudWatch latency metrics and alarms, flow logs for traffic detail, and network measurements like RTT and traceroute, you can effectively identify and diagnose latency issues in AWS Global Accelerator. Monitoring endpoint health and correlating with traffic patterns further helps pinpoint root causes, enabling you to optimize routing and improve application performance globally[1][2][8][9].
Citations:
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/measuring-aws-global-accelerator-performance-and-analyzing-results/
[2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/latest/dg/monitoring-global-accelerator.html
[3] https://aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/features/
[4] https://cloudonaut.io/review-aws-global-accelerator-latency-multi-region-disaster-recovery/
[5] https://www.thousandeyes.com/blog/aws-optimizes-performance-global-accelerator
[6] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/latest/dg/introduction-how-it-works.html
[7] https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/latency-metrics
[8] https://digitalcloud.training/aws-global-accelerator/
[9] https://cloudchipr.com/blog/aws-global-accelerator