Anomaly Detection

When you enable anomaly detection for a metric, CloudWatch applies statistical and machine learning algorithms. These algorithms continuously analyze metrics of systems and applications, determine normal baselines, and surface anomalies with minimal user intervention.

  1. Navigate to CloudWatch Metrics

    • Click here or:
      • Navigate to the AWS Console
      • Start typing CloudWatch in the AWS Services search box
      • Select CloudWatch
      • Select Metrics from the navigation menu

  2. Create Metric

    • Click on ApplicationELB
    • Click on Per AppELB Metrics
    • Select HTTPCode_Target_2XX_Count • 1 model (Sum) checkbox
    • Click on the Graphed metrics tab
    • If the line chart has gaps, consider changing the period to 1 Hour or another value
    • Click on the Anomaly Detection Icon Anomaly Detection icon

  3. Create an alarm based on anomalous behaviour

    • Click on the alarm icon under actions
    • Click Next
    • Select Create new topic
    • Enter lab-hits-topic for topic name
    • Enter [your email address] or example@example.com as an email address
    • Click Create topic
    • Click Next
    • Enter lab-hits-alarm for Alarm name
    • Click Next
    • Click Create alarm
    • Click on lab-hits-alarm
    • The alarm will intially show Insufficient data
    • Generate more traffic to your site by uploading more images and navigating around the site

Once you have generated a sufficient amount of anomalous traffic (it shouldn’t take much), the CloudWatch Alarm will move to a state of alarm. This is a fairly unrealist scenario because you do not have enough data to provide good training data to the model (as the application has only just been created) and you only have yourself as a user. However, you have used CloudWatch Anomaly Detection, which utilises machine learning to help you detect possible issues based on the number of successful page hits to your website.

Anomaly Alarm