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The Internet has a lot of moving parts: routers, switches, hubs, terrestrial and submarine cables, and connectors on the hardware side, and complex protocol stacks and configurations on the software side. When a problem occurs that slows down or disrupts the Internet and affects your customers, you want to be able to locate and understand the problem as quickly as possible.
new map
The new Amazon CloudWatch Internet Weather Map is here to help! Built on the global collection of monitors operated by AWS, you get a broad global view of Internet weather, with the ability to zoom in and understand performance and availability issues affecting specific cities.To access the map, open the CloudWatch console, expand Network Monitoring left and click Network Monitoring. A map appears showing weather around the world:
Red and yellow circles indicate currently active issues affecting availability or performance, respectively. Gray circles represent issues that have been resolved in the past 24 hours, and blue diamonds represent AWS regions. If you leave the map on the screen, the map will automatically refresh every 15 minutes.
Each issue affects a specific city network and represents a combination of the location from which clients are accessing AWS resources and the Autonomous System Number (ASN) used to access the resources. ASN usually represents each Internet Service Provider (ISP).
The list on the right side of the map shows active incidents at the top, followed by the most recently resolved incidents (going back 24 hours):
I can hover over any indicator to see a list of city networks in that geographic area:
If I zoom in a step or two, I can see these networks of cities spread across the United States:
I can zoom in further and see a network of cities:
This information can also be obtained programmatically.new ListInternetEvents The function returns up to 100 performance or availability events per call, optionally organized by time range, status (ACTIVE or RESOLVED), or enter (PERFORMANCE or AVAILABILITY). Each event contains complete details including latitude and longitude.
The new map is accessible from all AWS regions and is free to use. Going forward, we’re adding many great features to our roadmap and prioritizing them based on your feedback. Now we are thinking about:
- Shows the causes of certain types of outages, such as DDoS attacks, BGP route leaks, and routing interconnect issues.
- Add views specific to the selected ISP.
- Shows the impact on public SaaS applications.
Please feel free to send feedback about this feature to internet-monitor@amazon.com.
CloudWatch Internet Monitor
The information in the map is available to everyone using applications built on AWS. If you want to understand how Internet weather affects your specific AWS applications and take advantage of other features like health event notifications and traffic insights, you can use CloudWatch Internet Monitor. As my colleague Sébastien wrote when this feature was launched in late 2022:
You told us that one of the challenges when monitoring Internet-facing applications is collecting data outside of AWS to get a true understanding of how your application behaves for customers connected to multiple and geographically distant Internet providers. Capturing and monitoring data about internet traffic before it reaches your infrastructure is either difficult or prohibitively expensive.
After viewing the map, you can click Create monitor Get started with CloudWatch Internet Monitor:
You then enter a name for the monitor, select the AWS resources to monitor (VPCs, CloudFront distributions, Network Load Balancers, and Amazon WorkSpace directories), and then select the desired percentage of Internet-facing traffic to monitor. The monitor will start running within minutes, using entries from VPC flow logs, CloudFront access logs, and other telemetry data to identify the most relevant city networks.
Here are some resources to help you learn more about this feature:
— Jeff;