AWS Cloudwatch is now really open for business

In a surprise move Amazon today released a bunch of new features to its cloudwatch service, some of which, till now, were provided by third party service providers.

  • Basic Monitoring of Amazon EC2 instances at 5-minute intervals at no additional charge. AWS cloudwatch
  • Elastic Load Balancer Health Checks -Auto Scaling can now be instructed to automatically replace instances that have been deemed unhealthy by an Elastic Load Balancer.
  • Alarms - You can now monitor Amazon CloudWatch metrics, with notification to the Amazon SNS topic of your choice when the metric falls outside of a defined range.
  • Auto Scaling Suspend/Resume - You can now push a "big red button" in order to prevent scaling activities from being initiated.
  • Auto Scaling Follow the Line -You can now use scheduled actions to perform scaling operations at particular points in time, creating a time-based scaling plan.
  • Auto Scaling Policies - You now have more fine-grained control over the modifications to the size of your AutoScaling groups.
  • VPC and HPC Support - You can now use AutoScaling with Amazon EC2 instances that are running within your Virtual Private Cloud or as Cluster Compute instances.

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