AWS Application Load Balancer monitoring
Site24x7’s integration with AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) enables comprehensive monitoring of your ALB infrastructure, providing deep visibility into traffic patterns, request metrics, backend health, and latency. The integration allows you to collect and analyze critical performance metrics, create customized thresholds, configure alerts, and view detailed dashboards.
The integration also creates a dedicated child monitor for each Target Group associated with the ALB. This child monitor tracks performance and availability metrics specific to that target group, separate from the main ALB monitor.
Use case
A retail company hosts its e-commerce site on AWS using EC2 instances behind an ALB. During a seasonal sale, traffic spikes and users start reporting slow page loads and failed checkouts. Without proper monitoring, the operations team spends hours digging through logs and manually checking configurations. They eventually found that a target group had become unhealthy, and the load balancer wasn’t distributing traffic properly.
With Site24x7’s ALB integration in place, the same issue would be caught much earlier. Site24x7 would trigger alerts for rising 5XX errors and slow response times. The team could immediately view on the dashboard which target group was unhealthy and how traffic was being routed. This visibility lets the IT team fix the issue quickly, avoiding a long outage and minimizing customer impact.
By integrating ALB monitoring with Site24x7, IT teams get real-time visibility into load balancer performance, faster issue detection, and fewer disruptions during critical events like high-traffic sales.
Benefits of Site24x7's Application Load Balancer integration
Integrate your AWS Application Load Balancer environment with Site24x7 and leverage the following benefits:
- End-to-end visibility: Monitor all aspects of the ALB, including overall traffic, error rates, latency, processing times, bytes transferred, and backend health.
- Proactive alerting: Receive instant notifications for threshold breaches related to latency, HTTP error codes, unhealthy targets, and queue lengths.
- Health and performance insights: Monitor target group health, request latency, and error rates in real time.
- Automated correlation: Correlate ALB performance indicators with other AWS monitors (e.g., EC2, ECS, Lambda), providing context for broader infrastructure health.
Setup and configuration
- Log in to your Site24x7 account.
- Go to Cloud > AWS > Integrate AWS Account and create a cross-account IAM role to enable Site24x7 to access your AWS resources.
- On the Integrate AWS Account page, select Elastic Load Balancer from the Services to be discovered list based on your requirements.
Policy and permissions
The following ReadOnly permissions must be assigned to the created IAM or cross-account role to help discover and monitor ALB.
- "elasticloadbalancing:DescribeLoadBalancers",
- "elasticloadbalancing:DescribeTags",
- "elasticloadbalancing:DescribeListeners",
- "elasticloadbalancing:DescribeAccountLimits"
The following permissions are required to monitor your Target Group monitor:
- "elasticloadbalancing:DescribeTargetHealth",
- "elasticloadbalancing:DescribeTargetGroups"
Polling interval
Site24x7 polls the CloudWatch API and other service-level APIs per the poll frequency set (from once a minute to once a day), to collect performance metrics and metadata.
Other supported performance counters
Supported metrics
Application Load Balancer
The supported metrics for Application Load Balancer monitor are given below.
| Metric name | Description | Statistics | Unit |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Request count |
Measures the number of processed IPv4 and IPv6 requests where a successful response was generated by the load balancer. |
Sum and average |
Count |
|
Active connection count |
Measures the total number of concurrent TCP connections from clients to the load balancer and from the load balancer to the targets. |
Sum |
Count |
|
Rejected connection count |
Measures the number of connections that were rejected due to the Application ELB reaching its maximum connection limit. |
Sum |
Count |
|
New connection count |
Measures the total number of new TCP connections established between the client to load balancer and from load balancer to targets. |
Sum |
Count |
|
Healthy host count |
Measures the number of healthy targets registered with the Application Elastic Load Balancer, per Availability Zone. |
Maximum |
Count |
|
Unhealthy host count |
Measures the number of unhealthy targets registered with the Application ELB, per Availability Zone. |
Maximum |
Count |
|
ELB 4XX errors |
The number of HTTP 4xx client error codes generated by the Application ELB. |
Sum |
Count |
|
ELB 5XX errors |
The number of HTTP 5xx server error codes generated by the Application ELB. |
Sum |
Count |
|
Client TLS negotiation error count |
Measures the number of TLS connections started by the client that did not successfully establish a session with the load balancer. |
Sum |
Count |
|
Target TLS negotiation error count |
Measures the number of TLS connections started by the load balancer that did not successfully establish a session with the target. |
Sum |
Count |
|
Average Latency (This metric is called Target Response Time in AWS) |
Measures the time elapsed in seconds, once the request leaves the Application ELB until a response is received. |
Average |
Seconds |
|
Target connection error count |
Measures the number of connections that could not be successfully established between the Application ELB and the target. |
Sum |
Count |
|
Consumed LB capacity units |
Measures the total number of load balancer consumed units used by the Application ELB. |
Sum and average |
Count |
|
Rule evaluations |
Measures the number of rules processed by the Application ELB for a given request rate, averaged over an hour. |
Sum |
Count |
|
Processed bytes |
Measures the total number of bytes processed by the Application ELB for both IPv4 and IPv6 requests. |
Sum |
Bytes |
|
IPv6 request count |
Measures the total number of IPv6 requests received by the load balancer. |
Sum |
Count |
|
IPv6 processed bytes |
Measures the total number of bytes processed by the load balancer for IPv6 requests. |
Sum |
Bytes |
|
Desync mitigation mode non-compliant request count |
The number of requests that do not comply with RFC 7230. |
Sum |
Count |
|
HTTP fixed response count |
The number of fixed-response actions that were successful. |
Sum |
Count |
|
HTTP redirect count |
The number of redirect actions that were successful. |
Sum |
Count |
|
HTTP redirect URL limit exceeded count |
The number of redirect actions that couldn't be completed because the URL in the response location header is larger than 8K. |
Sum |
Count |
|
ELB 3XX count |
The number of HTTP 3XX redirection codes that originate from the load balancer. |
Sum |
Count |
|
ELB 500 count |
The number of HTTP 500 error codes that originate from the load balancer. |
Sum |
Count |
|
ELB 502 count |
The number of HTTP 502 error codes that originate from the load balancer. |
Sum |
Count |
|
ELB 503 count |
The number of HTTP 503 error codes that originate from the load balancer. |
Sum |
Count |
|
ELB 504 count |
The number of HTTP 504 error codes that originate from the load balancer. |
Sum |
Count |
Target Group
The supported metrics for the Target Group monitor are given below.
| Metric name | Description | Statistics | Unit |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Total healthy host count |
Measures the number of healthy targets registered to the Gateway Load Balancer. |
Sum |
Count |
|
Total unhealthy host count |
Measures the number of unhealthy targets attached to the Gateway Load Balancer. |
Sum |
Count |
|
Request count per target |
Measures the average number of requests received by each target, per target group. |
Sum |
Count |
|
Target HTTP 2XX errorsTarget HTTP 3XX errorsTarget HTTP 4XX errorsTarget HTTP 5XX errors |
Measures the total number of HTTP error response codes generated by the Application Load balancer. |
Sum |
Count |
Application Load Balancer configuration attributes
| Attribute name | Description |
|---|---|
|
ELB name |
The name of the Application load balancer in use. |
|
DNS name |
The DNS name for the application load balancer. |
|
Region |
Shows the name of the Region where the Application load balancer was created. |
|
ARN |
Specifies the unique Amazon Resource name assigned to the application load balancer. |
|
Availability zones |
Shows the list of availability zones where application requests get routed. |
|
VPC ID |
The ID of the Virtual Private Cloud, where the Application ELB was launched. |
|
ELB type |
Shows the type of Load balancer in use. |
|
Creation time |
Shows the time when the application load balancer node was created. |
|
Security groups |
Lists the security groups attached to the application type ELB. |
|
Scheme |
Specifies the type of load balancer in use - internet facing and internal. |
Threshold configurations
To configure thresholds for an Application Load Balancer monitor:
- Log in to your Site24x7 account and navigate to Admin > Configuration Profiles > Threshold and Availability.
- Click Add Threshold Profile.
- Select Application Load Balancer monitor type from the Monitor Type drop-down menu.
- Provide an appropriate name in the Display Name field.
- The supported metrics are displayed in the Threshold Configuration section. You can set threshold values for all the metrics mentioned above.
- Click Save.
Licensing
- Each application load balancer monitor utilizes one basic monitor license.
- Each Target Group monitor is a free monitor.
Forecast
Estimate future values of the following Application Load Balancer performance metrics and make informed decisions about adding capacity or scaling your AWS infrastructure.
- Request Count
- Rejected Connection Count
- Consumed LB Capacity Units
- Target Request Count
Viewing Application Load Balancer monitor
To monitor your Application Load Balancer environment, log in to your Site24x7 account and navigate to Cloud > AWS > Application Load Balancer.
Monitor data
Application Load Balancer
The monitor data for the Application Load Balancer monitor is given below.
Application Load Balancer
The Application Load Balancer tab provides an overview of the event timeline and metrics in the form of charts.
Target Groups
A Target Group is a collection of targets (such as EC2 instances, IP addresses, or Lambda functions) that an Application Load Balancer, Network Load Balancer, or Gateway Load Balancer routes traffic to.
In the Target Groups tab, you can view the Target Groups attached to your Application Load Balancer. Additionally, you can also view the number of Healthy Hosts and Unhealthy Hosts in each Target Group.
Click on an individual listing to view the Target Group monitor data.
Monitored Resources
View a list of monitored ACM monitors and other resources associated with your Application Load Balancer. Click on an individual listing to see performance and resource usage stats associated with that resource. You can also set thresholds and be notified when any of these services fail by clicking the pencil icon under Action.
In the current workflow, for an already integrated Application Load Balancer monitor, EC2 instances and other resources are listed under the Monitored Resources tab of the Application Load Balancer monitor. In the new flow, applicable to newly integrated monitors, EC2 instances will be listed only under the Target Group monitor, while ACM monitors will continue to appear in the Monitored Resources tab of the Application Load Balancer monitor.
Zia Forecast
The Zia Forecast chart displays future points of a performance metric (measurement of resource usage) based on historical time series data. Fifteen days of historical data are used to predict what your metric usage will be in the next seven days.
Configuration Details
View the configuration details such as Region , Availability Zones , ELB Type , and DNS Name in this tab.
Outages
The Outages tab provides details on an outage's start time, end time, duration, and comments (if any).
Inventory
Obtain details like the ELB Name , Check Frequency , and Monitor Licensing Category on the Inventory tab. The Threshold and Availability Profile and the Notification Profile can be set according to the user and viewed on this tab.
Log Report
This tab offers a consolidated report of each Application Load Balancer monitor's log status, which can be downloaded as a CSV file.
Alert Logs
This tab displays a chronological list of all triggered alerts related to the Application Load Balancer monitor. This tab helps you trace alert history and severity to assess issues and validate threshold settings.
Target Group
Summary
The Summary tab offers a comprehensive overview of the events timeline and metrics, presenting insightful charts that shed light on the performance and behavior of the metrics configured in your Target Group environment.
Targets
The Targets tab provides a detailed view of the health status of each target registered under the Application Load Balancer. For each target, you can view details such as Instance ID , Availability Zone , and Current Health Status . This helps you quickly identify which targets are failing and why. You also get a summarized view of how many targets in each availability zone are healthy, unhealthy, unused, initializing, or draining. This breakdown helps you pinpoint zone-specific issues and understand how evenly traffic is being distributed.
Attributes
The Attributes tab displays key configuration settings that control how traffic is handled within the target group.
View a list of monitored EC2 instances associated with your Application Load Balancer. Click on an individual listing to see performance and resource usage stats associated with that resource. You can also set thresholds and be notified when any of these services fail by clicking the pencil icon under Action.
Zia Forecast
The Zia forecast chart displays future points of a performance metric (measurement of resource usage) based on historical time series data. Fifteen days of historical data is used to predict what your metric usage will be in the next seven days.
Configuration
View the configuration details, such as Target Group Configuration and Health Check Configuration, in this tab.
Outages
The Outages tab provides details on an outage's start time, end time, duration, and comments (if any).
Inventory
Obtain details like the ELB Name , Check Frequency , and Monitor Licensing Category on the Inventory tab. The Threshold and Availability Profile and the Notification Profile can be set according to the user and viewed on this tab.
Log Report
This tab offers a consolidated report of each Target Group monitor's log status, which can be downloaded as a CSV file.
Alert Logs
This tab displays a chronological list of all triggered alerts related to the Target Group monitor. This tab helps you trace alert history and severity to assess issues and validate threshold settings.
Related topics
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On this page
- Use case
- Benefits of Site24x7's Application Load Balancer integration
- Setup and configuration
- Policy and permissions
- Polling interval
- Other supported performance counters
- Supported metrics
- Threshold configurations
- Licensing
- Forecast
- Viewing Application Load Balancer monitor
- Monitor data