hi stackers!
Following caurmen's great tutorial about putting landing pages on Amazon's Cloudfront, I'm wondering if cloudwatch is good for monitoring as it's in the same Amazon eco system?
http://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/
Or third party tools like pingdom is better and more cost-effective?
Thanks!
Cloudwatch is a very good monitoring service and it's inexpensive, but I think it's better to use it in conjunction with an independent service that's not part of the same ecosystem. What happens if the server that's hosting your landing page goes down, and the outage propagates through the AWS network to the Cloudwatch servers? Amazon must have taken this into account in its cloud architecture but nothing is foolproof.
Cloudwatch is useful for frequently monitoring Cloudfront metrics such as 4xx and 5xx errors. It's probably a good idea to have lower frequency monitoring using a second service such as Pingdom. If you're on a tight budget Host Tracker has a free tier, it's limited to two metrics every 30 minutes but depending on your level of activity that may be sufficient as a backup.
Another reason you may want to use a service like Pingdom is for real user monitoring. This can monitor important performance metrics such as user-perceived page load time.