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I have an Amazon EC2 web server that talks to a second database server instance... the web site is for a TV show, so the site tends to run a normal load of traffic until it's mentioned on the air and then it's completely and totally slammed.

Last time this happened the site got ~80k hits/minute and it went down for 15 minutes. Since then, I've implemented some caching and other technology on the server to help it handle the load better.

In the coming weeks, there will be a few times that the site will be flashed across TV screens into millions of homes once again, and I want to be sure the server can handle the load. As part of that, I'd like to be able to monitor the traffic and see what's coming. And, if the server goes down, I'd like to be able to see the data on that after the event and understand what happened (did the database choke? or the web server? etc.).

How can I track this traffic/information in AWS?

Eric
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  • We have a canonical Q&A that addresses this. You'll likely find lots of great information there. In addition, you may want to consider enabling detailed cloudwatch monitoring for your instance, and possibly even implementing New Relic application monitoring. – EEAA Feb 08 '13 at 01:52
  • Sounds like you might need a consultant if your load spikes almost instantly to far beyond what a machine can handle unless you're keeping systems on idle standby, have a static content failover, or are otherwise able to scale up almost instantly. – Jeff Ferland Feb 08 '13 at 02:36
  • Thank you-- is the "canonical Q&A" the ServerFault search function? Or is it something else entirely? – Eric Feb 10 '13 at 23:36
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    @Eric - no, when we refer to "canonical" Q&As, we mean that this specific Q&A is the best material we have on a certain topic at that point. In the case of your question, you asked about server monitoring, and instead of having people duplicate effort going over all the various monitoring products, we just close/dupe to our canonical monitoring Q&A. If you'd like to see the entire list of the various canonical Q&As we've collected, see [this post](http://meta.serverfault.com/questions/1986/what-are-the-canonical-answers-weve-discovered-over-the-years) on Meta.SF. – EEAA Feb 11 '13 at 03:09
  • If you know when you expect traffic you can use [scheduled scaling](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ec2/userguide/schedule_time.html). – Tim Aug 19 '18 at 22:58

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You need to check Amazon CloudWatch. Amazon Web Services(AWS) enables you to use the CloudWatch service to monitor your cloud services. In addition to that, combining the CloudWatch service with the AWS AutoScaling will give you the ability to add more resources such as new ec2 instances on the fly based on resource usage. To give you an example, you can setup your cloud environment to launch additional ec2 instances if the network usage goes above a certain level.

Daniel t.
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