🧪 Lab 5: Cloud Monitoring & Incident Response (AWS)

Course: CompTIA Cloud+ CV0-004
Objective: Set up cloud monitoring, create alarms, and simulate a basic incident response process using AWS CloudWatch.

🎯 Goals

Enable detailed monitoring on EC2
Create CloudWatch alarms
Simulate high CPU usage
Automate notification with SNS

📊 Part 1: Enable Monitoring on EC2

Go to EC2 Dashboard
Select your instance (cloudplus-ec2)
Under Monitoring tab, click Enable Detailed Monitoring

✅ Checkpoint: Instance now sends 1-minute metrics to CloudWatch.

🔔 Part 2: Create CloudWatch Alarm

Go to CloudWatch → Alarms → Create alarm
Choose EC2 → cloudplus-ec2 → Metric: CPUUtilization
Conditions:
Threshold: CPUUtilization > 70% for 2 datapoints within 5 minutes
Notification:
Create new SNS topic → cloud-alerts
Email subscription: your email address
Confirm the subscription from your inbox

✅ Checkpoint: Alarm and notification system are ready.

🔥 Part 3: Simulate High CPU Usage

SSH into your EC2 instance:

ssh -i "cloudplus-key.pem" ec2-user@<your-public-ip>

Install stress tool:

sudo amazon-linux-extras install epel -y
sudo yum install -y stress

Run stress test:

stress --cpu 2 --timeout 300

✅ Checkpoint: Alarm should trigger within 5 minutes and send an email.

🛠️ Part 4: Review Alarm and Take Action

Go back to CloudWatch → Alarms
View status change and notifications
Take manual action (e.g., reboot instance or notify team)