You can use monitoring features to identify and troubleshoot issues that occur on Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances and address potential risks before the issues and risks affect your business.
Diagnose instance health status
Use the instance health diagnosis feature to perform a comprehensive check of the instance's operating system configuration, network status, and disk status. The diagnostic report categorizes issues by severity and provides solutions to help you promptly resolve potential risks. For more information, see Comprehensive instance diagnosis.
Handle system events promptly
The system automatically sends system events when it performs certain O&M actions or detects issues that might affect instance operations. System events include recommended actions and event timelines. Handle system events promptly to prevent issues such as instance restarts or stops from affecting your business. For more information, see Overview of ECS system events.
In the Message Center, subscribe to internal messages for notifications such as ECS expiration, product maintenance, and ECS failures. If you do not enable these messages, you will not receive system events in the ECS console. The following image shows the settings page.
Monitor instance metrics
Alibaba Cloud collects and displays instance metrics so you can view the real-time and historical performance of your instance. Use these metrics to determine whether the instance is running normally. For example, consistently high CPU utilization might indicate an abnormal process or an undersized instance configuration.
You can view instance metrics on the Monitoring tab of the instance details page in the ECS console or on the Host Monitoring page in the CloudMonitor console. For more information, see View instance monitoring information and Overview of host monitoring.
The metrics displayed on the instance details page in the ECS console are as follows:
Instance compute, storage, and network resource usage, such as CPU utilization, disk read/write status, and the number of packets sent and received.
CPU credit usage for burstable instances.
The OS Monitoring tab on the Host Monitoring page in the CloudMonitor console displays the following metrics:
Instance compute, storage, and network resource usage, such as CPU utilization, disk read/write status, and the number of packets sent and received.
Information about active processes within the instance.
GPU memory usage for GPU-accelerated instances.
Use the alert service for automatic notifications
Use the CloudMonitor alert service to set alert rules for specific events or instance metrics. When a specified event occurs or an instance metric becomes abnormal, the service automatically notifies contacts by email or other methods. This reduces the need for manual O&M. For more information, see Subscribe to ECS system event notifications and Set alert rules for an ECS instance.
The following figure shows an example of an alert rule for an event.
The following figure shows an example of an alert rule for an instance metric.
