Amazon CloudWatch Internet Weather Map: View and Analyze Internet Status | Amazon Web Services

The Internet has a lot of moving parts: routers, switches, hubs, terrestrial and undersea cables and connectors on the hardware side, and complex configurations and protocol stacks on the software side. When something goes wrong and slows down or disrupts the Internet in a way that impacts your customers, you want to be able to locate and understand the problem as quickly as possible.

New map
The new Amazon CloudWatch Internet Weather Map is here to help! Built on a collection of global monitors operated by AWS, you get a broad, global view of the Internet climate, with the ability to zoom in and understand performance and availability issues affecting a particular city. To access the map, open the CloudWatch console, expand Network monitoring to the left and click internet monitor. The map appears and shows the weather for everyone:

Red and yellow circles indicate current active issues affecting availability or performance, respectively. Gray circles represent issues that were resolved in the last 24 hours, and blue diamonds represent AWS regions. The map will automatically update every 15 minutes if you leave it on the screen.

Each issue affects a specific network city, which represents a combination of a location where customers access AWS resources and the Autonomous System Number (ASN) that was used to access the resources. ASNs typically represent individual Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

The list to the right of the map shows active events at the top, followed by events that were resolved in the recent past, looking back up to 24 hours:

I can mouse over any of the indicators to see the list of city networks in the geographic area:

If I zoom in a step or two, I can see that those networks of cities are spread all over the United States:

I can zoom in even closer and see a single network of cities:

This information is also available programmatically. The new ListInternetEvents The function returns up to 100 performance or availability events per call, with optional filtering by time range, status (ACTIVE either RESOLVED), or type (PERFORMANCE either AVAILABILITY). Each event includes full details including latitude and longitude.

The new map can be accessed from all AWS Regions and there is no charge to use it. Looking ahead, we have many powerful additions on the roadmap, subject to prioritization based on your feedback. Right now we are thinking about:

1. Show causes of certain types of outages, such as DDoS attacks, BGP route leaks, and problems with route interconnections.
2. Add a view that is specific to a chosen ISP.
3. Showing the impact on public SaaS applications.

Please feel free to send feedback about this feature to internet-monitor@amazon.com.

CloudWatch Internet Monitor
The information in the map applies to everyone who uses applications built on AWS. If you want to understand how the Internet weather affects your particular AWS applications and take advantage of other features, such as status event reporting and traffic information, you can use CloudWatch Internet Monitor. As my colleague Sébastien wrote when he released this feature in late 2022:

He told us that one of his challenges when monitoring Internet-connected applications is collecting data outside of AWS to create a realistic picture of how his application behaves for his clients connected to multiple, geographically distant Internet providers. Capturing and monitoring data about Internet traffic before it reaches your infrastructure is difficult or very expensive.

After reviewing the map, you can click Create monitor To get started with CloudWatch Internet Monitor:

After that, enter a name for your monitor, choose the AWS resources (VPCs, CloudFront distributions, network load balancers, and Amazon WorkSpace directories) to monitor, and then select the desired percentage of Internet traffic to monitor. The monitor will go live within minutes, using inputs from your VPC flow logs, CloudFront access logs, and other telemetry to identify the most relevant city networks.

Below are some resources to help you learn more about this feature:

— Jeff;