eG Monitoring
 

Measures reported by AWSS3ExternalTest

Amazon Simple Storage Service is storage for the Internet. Amazon S3 has a simple web services interface that you can use to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.

To store your data in Amazon S3, you work with resources known as buckets and objects. A bucket is a container for objects. An object is a file and any metadata that describes that file.

To store an object in Amazon S3, you create a bucket and then upload the object to a bucket. When the object is in the bucket, you can open it, download it, and move it. When you no longer need an object or a bucket, you can clean up these resources.

If users are unable to access an S3 bucket, or if they complain of slowness/failures when uploading/downloading files from a bucket, overall user experience with Amazon's storage services will suffer. To assure users of an above-par experience with S3 at all times, administrators should be able to rapidly identify ‘problematic’ buckets. This is where the AWSS3ExternalTest helps! This test tracks uploads/downloads to each S3 bucket that is configured for monitoring. In the process, the test promptly captures and reports the following:

  • Are any buckets unavailable over the web? If so, which ones?

  • Is any bucket responding slowly to web requests? Which ones are these?

  • Did uploads to/downloads from any bucket fail?

  • Was any unusual slowness observed when uploading files to/downloading files from any particular bucket?

This way, administrators can monitor the health of the S3 service, and accurately identify the bucket that is degrading the quality of that service.

Output of the test: One set of results for each bucket in each AWS region

First-level descriptor: AWS Region

Second-level descriptor: Bucket name

The measures made by this test are as follows:

Measurement Description Measurement Unit Interpretation
S3_availability Indicates whether/not this bucket is accessible over the web. Percent The value 0 indicates that the bucket is unavailable. The value 100 on the other hand indicates that the bucket is available and accessible over the web.
S3_responsetime Indicates the average time taken by this bucket to respond to web requests. Milliseconds A high value is a cause for concern, as it indicates that the bucket is responding slowly to requests.
Upload_status Indicates whether/not uploads to this bucket succeeded.   The values that this measure reports and their corresponding numeric values are detailed in the table below:

Measure Value Numeric Value
Failure 0
Success 1

Note:

This measure reports the Measure Values in the table above to indicate the success/failure of uploads to a bucket. In the graph of this measure however, the same is represented using numeric equivalents only.
Upload_time Indicates the time taken to upload files to this bucket. Milliseconds A high value indicates a bottleneck when uploading files to the bucket. Compare the value of this measure across buckets to identify the bucket to which uploads failed.
Download_status Indicates whether/not downloads from this bucket succeeded.   The values that this measure reports and their corresponding numeric values are detailed in the table below:

Measure Value Numeric Value
Failure 0
Success 1

Note:

This measure reports the Measure Values in the table above to indicate the success/failure of downloads from a bucket. In the graph of this measure however, the same is represented using numeric equivalents only.
Download_time Indicates the time taken to download files from this bucket. Milliseconds A high value indicates a bottleneck when downloading files from the bucket. Compare the value of this measure across buckets to identify the bucket from which downloads failed.