Monitoring traffic volumes between client devices and DNS resolvers can reveal a lot of information about botnets, malware, and even DDoS attacks. This is why Site24x7 is now offering support for monitoring Route 53—the highly scalable and reliable DNS offering from Amazon.

Route 53 Health Check

Amazon Route 53 periodically submits automated requests to your application, server or HTTP endpoints to verify that it's available and functional across regions. Site24x7 collects these metrics from CloudWatch and displays it as time series charts in the web console giving you visual aid on how each Health Check is performing.

Route 53 Resolver

Your Route 53 Resolver manages the conditional forwarding rules you've configured and re-directs the query traffic based on it. Site24x7 gathers information on the total inbound and outbound query volumes and helps you determine the appropriate routing policy and refine the existing ones. 

Route 53 Hosted Zone

A Hosted Zone contains multiple record sets, each one defining how traffic is to be routed. For better insights, Site24x7 uses query logs to fetch information on the queries that Route 53 receives to collects metrics such as: total request count, the response codes, query types and the edge location details and shows how traffic is routed.

Route 53 Hosted Zone Record Set

Visualize and manage your routing policies. Route 53 uses the Query Logging capability to gather information about the queries that are received by the records in a Hosted Zone. You can view these metrics for individual record sets in Site24x7 and also picture the traffic policy configuration.

Through this integration with Site24x7, you can now:

1. Focus on individual Health Checks

Keep an eye on critical web servers that receive a high volume of traffic by closely monitoring the health checks for those resources. You can also devise a failover mechanism as needed. 

2. Aggregate, analyze, and visualize all Route53 metrics in a single console

If you're using Site24x7 to monitor your AWS resources such as EC2 instances and S3 buckets, you can correlate the metrics and compare them on dashboards that give you the live status of all your resources. 

3. Be proactive and implement threshold-based alerting

It helps to have all your data in one place. What's more important, however, is receiving notification when your resources aren't functioning properly. For example, unusually high inbound queries could potentially crash your site. Configuring conditional threshold strategies will help you learn about incidents that are waiting to happen. 

Licensing

1. Each Route 53 monitor is considered one basic monitor.

2. Ten record sets will consume one basic monitor (Route 53 Hsoted Zone Record Set) license. You can add any number of record sets for monitoring.

Happy monitoring!