Note that the EBS optimized option is not available for this EC2 instance.

Here the bottleneck is CPU on the EC2 web application hosts. You can address this by using different instance types targeted at the high CPU needs, or you can use Auto Scaling to add additional Web servers to respond to demand.

If you create an Auto Scaling group using the CLI or an API, detailed CloudWatch monitoring is a default.

You can aggregate your data before you publish to CloudWatch. When you have multiple data points per minute, aggregating data minimizes the number of calls to put-metric-data. For example, instead of calling put-metric-data multiple times for three data points that are within three seconds of each other, you can aggregate the data into a statistic set that you publish with one call, using the --statistic-values parameter.

There is no fetch – this option is actually called ignore.

The metrics you configure with CloudWatch for your Amazon SNS topics are automatically collected and pushed to CloudWatch every five minutes. These metrics are gathered on all topics that meet the CloudWatch guidelines for being active. A topic is considered active by CloudWatch for up to six hours from the last activity (i.e., any API call) on the topic.

You can zoom in graphs in CloudWatch by dragging on the graph area, and then releasing the drag.

AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure. CloudTrail provides event history of your AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services. This event history simplifies security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting.