Monitor EC2 Instances with CloudWatch Alarms and Dashboards

Amazon CloudWatch is the native monitoring and observability service for AWS, providing a unified view of operational health across cloud resources. For EC2 instances, CloudWatch collects and tracks metrics such as CPU utilization, network traffic, and disk activity, enabling engineers to detect performance anomalies, trigger automated responses, and maintain service-level objectives. When combined with CloudWatch alarms and Amazon SNS, teams can build proactive alerting pipelines that notify operators the moment a resource deviates from expected behavior, turning reactive firefighting into structured incident response.

In this lab, you will enable detailed monitoring on an EC2 instance to collect metrics at one-minute intervals, create CloudWatch alarms that trigger on high CPU utilization and failed status checks, build a CloudWatch dashboard to visualize instance health in a single pane of glass, and configure an SNS topic to deliver email notifications when an alarm enters the ALARM state.

Objectives

Upon completing this beginner level lab, you will be able to:

• Enable detailed monitoring on an EC2 instance to collect metrics at one-minute intervals
• Create a CloudWatch alarm that triggers when CPU utilization exceeds a defined threshold
• Create a CloudWatch alarm for EC2 status check failures
• Create an SNS topic and subscribe an email endpoint for alarm notifications
• Build a CloudWatch dashboard with widgets displaying CPU utilization, network traffic, and status check metrics

Who is this lab for?

This lab is designed for:

• Cloud beginners who want to learn the fundamentals of AWS monitoring and alerting
• Junior cloud engineers looking to build operational skills with CloudWatch metrics, alarms, and dashboards

Basic familiarity with the AWS Console and EC2 instances is recommended but not required.