AWS Gateway Load Balancer monitoring
Site24x7’s integration with AWS Gateway Load Balancer helps you monitor the health and performance of your gateway load balancer setup. By collecting metrics and configuration data from AWS, Site24x7 gives you visibility into how traffic is being routed to third-party appliances such as firewalls and traffic inspection tools deployed in your virtual private cloud. Site24x7 tracks associated components such as target groups, availability zones, and endpoint connections to help you isolate issues and optimize network traffic flow.
This integration creates a dedicated child monitor for each Target Group associated with the gateway load balancer (GWLB), but only for newly created monitors. This does not apply to Gateway Load Balancer monitors that were already integrated under the current workflow.
Use case
If you're running a fleet of virtual appliances for deep packet inspection or firewall filtering, you might use AWS Gateway Load Balancer to distribute traffic across those appliances in a scalable and fault-tolerant setup.
With Site24x7’s integration, you can monitor how traffic flows through the load balancer and check whether it’s being evenly distributed across all appliances. You’ll get alerted if an endpoint connection fails, or if any availability zone becomes unhealthy. This helps your network team identify issues quickly and maintain uninterrupted traffic inspection.
Benefits of Site24x7's GWLB integration
Integrate your AWS Gateway Load Balancer environment with Site24x7 and leverage the following benefits:
- Centralized visibility: Monitor all your GWLB across regions from a single console.
- Target group-level insights: A dedicated child monitor is automatically created for each target group, giving you detailed data on backend health and performance.
- Proactive alerting: Sends real-time alerts when configured thresholds are breached, helping reduce downtime.
- Historical data and trends: Access historical performance data to understand traffic patterns and plan capacity more effectively.
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 are required to be assigned to the created IAM or cross-account Role to help discover and monitor the Gateway Load Balancer.
- "elasticloadbalancing:DescribeLoadBalancers",
- "elasticloadbalancing:DescribeTags",
- "elasticloadbalancing:DescribeListeners",
- "elasticloadbalancing:DescribeAccountLimits",
- "ec2Instance:describeVpcEndpoints",
- "ec2Instance:describeVpcEndpointServiceConfigurations"
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 as 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
Gateway Load Balancer
The supported metrics for Gateway Load Balancer monitor are given below.
| Metric name | Description | Statistics | Unit |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Active flow count |
The total number of concurrent flows (or connections) from clients to targets. |
Average |
Count |
|
Connected endpoints |
The total number of endpoints connected to the GWLB. |
Sum |
Count |
|
Consumed LCUs |
The number of load balancer capacity units (LCU) used by your load balancer. |
Sum and average |
Unit |
|
New flow count |
The total number of new flows (or connections) established from clients to targets in the time period. |
Sum |
Count |
|
Processed bytes |
The total number of bytes processed by the load balancer; this count includes traffic to and from targets but not health check traffic. |
Sum |
MB |
|
Total unhealthy host count |
The number of targets that are considered unhealthy. |
Sum |
Count |
|
Total Healthy host count |
The number of targets that are considered healthy. |
Sum |
Count |
Availability Zone
The supported Availability Zone metrics are given below.
| Metric name | Description | Statistics | Unit |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Active flow count |
The total number of concurrent flows (or connections) from clients to targets per Availability Zone. |
Average |
Count |
|
Processed bytes |
The total number of bytes processed by the load balancer per Availability Zone; this count includes traffic to and from targets but not health check traffic. |
Sum |
MB |
|
New flow count |
The total number of new flows (or connections) established from clients to targets in the time period per Availability Zone. |
Sum |
Count |
Target Group
The supported metrics for the Target Group monitor are given below.
| Metric name | Description | Statistics | Unit |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Healthy host count |
Measures the number of healthy targets registered to GWLB. |
Sum |
Count |
|
Unhealthy host count |
Measures the number of unhealthy targets attached to the GWLB. |
Sum |
Count |
Gateway Load Balancer configuration attributes
| Attribute name | Description |
|---|---|
|
ELB name |
The name of the load balancer. |
|
Region |
The name of the region where the GWLB instance was created. |
|
ELB type |
Type of the load balancer. |
|
Creation time |
The time when the GWLB node was created. |
|
Availability zones |
The Availability Zone where the GWLB node was created. |
|
VPC ID |
The ID for the load balancers that are deployed within Amazon VPC. |
|
Deletion protection enabled |
Displays if deletion protection is enabled or disabled for the GWLB. |
|
Load balancing cross zone enabled |
Displays if a cross zone is enabled or disabled for the GWLB. |
Threshold configurations
To configure thresholds for a Gateway Load Balancer monitor:
- Log in to your Site24x7 account and navigate to Admin > Configuration Profiles > Threshold and Availability.
- Click Add Threshold Profile.
- Select the Gateway 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 Gateway Load Balancer monitor utilizes one basic monitor license.
- Each Target Group monitor is a free monitor.
Forecast
Estimate future values of the following GWLB performance metric and make informed decisions about adding capacity or scaling your AWS infrastructure:
- Consumed LCUs
Viewing Gateway Load Balancer monitor
To monitor your GWLB environment, log in to your Site24x7 account and navigate to Cloud > AWS > Gateway Load Balancer.
Monitor data
Gateway Load Balancer
The monitor data for the Gateway Load Balancer monitor is given below.
Gateway Load Balancer
The Gateway 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 Gateway 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.
Availability Zone
This tab displays how the Gateway Load Balancer is performing across different availability zones in your AWS region.
View a list of monitored ACM monitors and other resources associated with your GWLB. 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 Gateway Load Balancer monitor, EC2 instances and other resources are listed under the Monitored Resources tab of the Gateway 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 Gateway Load Balancer monitor.
Endpoints Connections
The Endpoint Connections tab displays the Endpoint Connections monitor integrated with the GWLB. Click the individual monitor name to view the Endpoints monitor data.
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 provides a consolidated report of each Gateway 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 Gateway 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 provides 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 GWLB. 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 receive 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.
Monitored Resources
View a list of monitored EC2 instances associated with your GWLB. 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 are 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 provides 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.
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