Recently, I encountered a task where a business was using AWS Elastic Beanstalk but was struggling to understand the system state due to the lack of comprehensive metrics in CloudWatch. By default, CloudWatch only provides a few basic metrics such as CPU and Networks. However, it’s worth noting that Memory and Disk metrics are not included in the default metric collection.
Fortunately, each Elastic Beanstalk virtual machine (VM) comes with a CloudWatch agent that can be easily configured to collect additional metrics. For example, if you need information about VM memory consumption, which AWS does not provide out of the box, you can configure the CloudWatch agent to collect this data. This can greatly enhance your visibility into the performance and health of your Elastic Beanstalk environment, allowing you to make informed decisions and optimize your application’s performance.