Proactive Amazon EKS monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch Operator and AWS Control Plane metrics

This article explains how to implement proactive monitoring for Amazon EKS clusters using CloudWatch and the CloudWatch Observability Operator to detect issues and maintain cluster health.

• Amazon EKS 1.28+ automatically sends control plane metrics to CloudWatch at no extra cost
• CloudWatch Observability Operator collects logs, metrics, and traces from containerized environments
• Monitor API server health through request errors, throttling, and performance degradation
• Scheduler metrics detect pod scheduling bottlenecks and resource constraint issues
• CloudWatch Application Signals auto-instruments applications without code changes
• Anomaly detection uses machine learning to identify unusual metric patterns
• Monitor admission webhook health to prevent silent deployment failures
• Track etcd database size to prevent read-only cluster state at 8GB limit
• Use CloudWatch Log Insights to correlate metrics with logs for root cause analysis

The article provides practical guidance for setting up comprehensive EKS monitoring, detecting scheduling issues, API throttling, webhook failures, and etcd storage problems through CloudWatch dashboards and alarms.