Synthetic Monitoring

Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics enables you to create canaries to monitor your endpoints and APIs. Canaries are configurable scripts that follow the same routes and perform the same actions as a customer. This enables the outside-in view of your customers’ experiences, and your service’s availability from their point of view.

If your account has been provisioned for you by AWS for the purpose of completing this lab, you will need to skip this section of the lab.

  1. Navigate to CloudWatch Synthetics

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

  2. Create Canary

    • Click on Create Canary

    • Select GUI workflow builder

    • Enter lab-login-canary for Name

    • Enter [Application URL]/users/sign_in as the Application or endpoint URL you are testing

    • Under Workflow builder:

      • Choose Input text in the action dropdown
      • Enter [id='user_email'] in the selector input
      • Enter admin@admin.com in the text input
      • Click Add action
      • Choose Input text in the action dropdown
      • Enter [id='user_password'] in the selector input
      • Enter Password123 in the text input
      • Click Add action
      • Choose Click with navigation in the action dropdown
      • Enter [name='commit'] in the selector input
      • Click Add action
      • Choose Verify Selector in the action dropdown
      • Enter [href='../../users/sign_out'] in the selector input

    • Toggle Enable thresholds for this canary

    • Click Create canary

    Note: This operation may take up to a minute. Please be patient while it completes.

    Canaries

    • Click on lab-login-canary

    Explore the Summary, Availability graph and Screenshots. Try clicking on HAR File to view request information and Logs to view execution information. This canary is testing your login process.

  3. Generate a failure

    • Change the admin email in the ImageTrends application
      • Log in to ImageTrends using the URL that you made a note of earlier (CloudFormation Output)
      • Enter admin@admin.com for email
      • Enter Password123 for Password
      • Select My Profile from the drop down in the top right when logged in as admin
      • Change Email to something like admin2@admin.com
      • Enter Password123 for Current password

  4. Create an Alarm

    • Select Thresholds from the navigation menu
    • Toggle Sharp drop
    • Click Save
    • Click Yes, Save Changes
    • Wait for the alarm to change status to Alarm

  5. Resolve the failure

    • Change the admin email back in the ImageTrends application
      • Select My Profile from the drop down in the top right when logged in as admin
      • Change Email back to admin@admin.com
      • Enter Password123 for Current password
      • Wait for the alarm to change status to OK

  6. View the results

    • Select Canaries from the navigation menu
    • Click on lab-login-canary
    • You can click on the red dots on the graph to view the Screenshots, HAR File and Logs
    • Screenshot 05-redirection-result shows the login failure

Canary Errors

You have used CloudWatch Synthetics to detect issues in your application workflow. In this case, you have created a workflow to detect issues with the login process from the customer perspective.