Monitoring Internet Performance with Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor - Visualizing Availability and Latency
Learn how Internet Monitor tracks application performance over the internet, analyzes availability by ISP, and detects health events.
Overview of Internet Monitor
Internet Monitor leverages internet measurement data from over 500 cities worldwide to analyze traffic from CloudFront distributions and VPCs, monitoring application performance over the internet. It combines internet measurement data collected by AWS globally with your application's traffic data to visualize availability and latency broken down by ISP and region.
Health Events and Usage Patterns
Internet Monitor generates health events when internet-side issues are affecting your application. It provides information such as availability drops at a specific ISP or latency increases in a particular region. You can receive notifications via EventBridge and build automated response workflows that switch CloudFront origins or trigger Route 53 failovers. Visualizing the geographic distribution of traffic is also useful for optimizing CDN edge location selection and regional placement.
Leveraging Data for Traffic Optimization
Internet Monitor data can be combined with CloudFront origin failover and Route 53 health checks for traffic optimization. When performance degrades for a specific ISP or region, it provides the data needed to make decisions like routing traffic to a different region using Route 53 geolocation routing. You can build workflows that receive health events via EventBridge and use Lambda to automatically modify CloudFront cache behavior or notify operations teams via SNS. Analyzing historical performance data helps identify recurring performance degradation patterns at specific times or in specific regions, informing CDN configuration and origin placement optimization. To gain a deeper understanding of network design with Internet Monitor, specialized books on Amazon are a useful resource.
Internet Monitor Pricing and Configuration
Internet Monitor charges based on the traffic volume of monitored resources (CloudFront distributions, VPCs). You can set the monitored traffic percentage from 1-100%, balancing cost and coverage. For high-traffic workloads, sampling at 10-25% still provides statistically sufficient accuracy. Availability and performance scores are published as CloudWatch metrics, so they integrate seamlessly with existing CloudWatch dashboards and alarms. Adjust health event thresholds to prevent alert fatigue from minor performance fluctuations.
Summary
Internet Monitor visualizes application performance over the internet by ISP and region. It automatically detects internet-side outages and notifies you through health events, providing the data needed for traffic optimization decisions when combined with Route 53 geolocation routing and CloudFront origin failover. Sampling rate adjustments let you balance cost and coverage.