# Monitor and optimize with the Internet Monitor dashboard
Using the Internet Monitor dashboard in the AWS Management Console, you can visualize data and get insights and suggestions about your AWS application's internet traffic, and configure options for your monitor.
After you create a monitor to monitor your application's internet performance and availability, Internet Monitor stores internet measurements for pairs of your client locations and ASNs, or *city-networks*. Internet Monitor also creates aggregated CloudWatch metrics for traffic to your application, and to each AWS Region and edge location. You can filter, explore, and get action-oriented suggestions from your monitor's information in several different ways. The Internet Monitor dashboard guides you through viewing and getting insights about the data for your monitored traffic.
To get started, on the CloudWatch console, under **Network Monitoring**, choose **Internet monitors**. Then, select a monitor to work with.
**Note**
This section primarily describes how to filter and view Internet Monitor metrics using the AWS Management Console. Alternatively, you can use Internet Monitor API operations with the AWS CLI or an SDK to work directly with Internet Monitor events stored in CloudWatch Logs files. For more information, see [Using your monitor and measurements information](IMWhyCreateMonitor.md#IMAccessIMInformation). For more information about using API operations, see [Examples of using the CLI with Internet Monitor](CloudWatch-IM-get-started-CLI.md) and the [Internet Monitor API Reference](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/internet-monitor/latest/api/Welcome.html).
There are five pages (tabs) in the Internet Monitor dashboard:
+ On the **Overview** page, you can get an overall view of your monitored traffic, including current performance and availability information, a summary of recent and current health events, and the top suggestion for potentially improving performance for your clients.
+ On the **Health events** page, you can see current and historical health events that currently impact, or previously impacted, locations where clients access your application.
+ On the **Analyze** page, you can view information about top monitored traffic in client locations (by traffic volume), summarized in several customizable ways. You can also see historical trends for health scores and metrics. You can filter by location, ASN, date, and so on, and visualize metrics for your internet traffic over time.
+ On the **Optimize** page, Internet Monitor predicts your application's performance improvement for top AWS Regions (or Amazon CloudFront), based on your traffic patterns and past performance. For each top configuration, associated tables provide a breakdown of reduced latency by client location. On a second page, you can select multiple Regions (and, if you like, include CloudFront configurations) to compare latency reductions. For each configuration (Region) that you selected, the page displays an associated table of latency details, listed by city location.
+ On the **Configure** page, you can see monitor details and configure options, such as the percentage of traffic to monitor.
In addition to these dashboard options, you can use tools for deeper dives into details of the metrics that Internet Monitor collects with your monitor. Internet Monitor generates and publishes log files with the measurements about your traffic, so you can use other CloudWatch tools in the console to further visualize the data published by Internet Monitor, including CloudWatch Contributor Insights, CloudWatch Metrics, and CloudWatch Logs Insights. For more information, see [Exploring your data with CloudWatch tools and the Internet Monitor query interface](CloudWatch-IM-view-cw-tools.md).
Learn about using Internet Monitor to explore your performance and availability measurements in the following sections.
**Topics**
+ [Track real-time performance and availability in Internet Monitor (Overview page)](CloudWatch-IM-overview.md)
+ [View health events and metrics in Internet Monitor (Health events page)](CloudWatch-IM-Health-events.md)
+ [Analyze historical data in Internet Monitor (Analyze page)](CloudWatch-IM-historical-explorer.md)
+ [Get suggestions to optimize application performance in Internet Monitor (Optimize page)](CloudWatch-IM-insights.md)
+ [Monitoring details in Internet Monitor (Configure page)](CloudWatch-IM-configure.md)
# Track real-time performance and availability in Internet Monitor (Overview page)
The **Overview** page in the Internet Monitor console shows you a high-level view of performance and availability for the traffic that your monitor tracks, and a timeline of when health events have impacted your monitored traffic. The page also provides the top suggestion for a configuration change that could reduce latency for clients who use your application in your top client location (by traffic volume).
**Traffic overview and Status**
The **Traffic overview** section provides an overall look at your application's availability and performance. Note that this section shows *aggregated* overall performance and availability scores that consider all of the traffic for applications towards all end users and service locations. You can see health scores for specific client locations and service locations by searching and filtering measurements information on the **Analyze** tab.
Under **Status**, you can see if your monitor is actively creating data for your monitor or is waiting for data to be available. You can also see the percentage of your application's traffic that you're monitoring. If you want to change the percentage, see the **Configure** page.
Internet Monitor uses a statistical process to create availability and performance scores for your monitored traffic. AWS has substantial historical data about internet performance and availability for network traffic between geographic locations for different ASNs and AWS services. Internet Monitor uses the connectivity data that AWS has captured from its global networking footprint to calculate a baseline of availability and performance for internet traffic. This is the same data that we use at AWS to monitor our own internet uptime and availability.
With those measurements as a baseline, Internet Monitor can detect when the performance and availability for your application has dropped, compared to the baseline. To make it easier to see those drops, we report that information to you as a performance score and an availability score.
For more information, see [How AWS calculates performance and availability scores](CloudWatch-IM-inside-internet-monitor.md#IMExperienceScores).
**Health events timeline**
The **Health events timeline** graph displays health events that have occurred during the past 24 hours. A summary below the graph shows your application's current and recent impact. For details, you can choose **See more health events**.
To change the thresholds for health events, go to the **Configure** page.
**Reduce latency for your top Region**
Internet Monitor automatically evaluates the AWS Region that your current application configuration uses most (that is, the Region with the highest client volume), and determines if another Region could provide a better aggregate time to first byte (TTFB) for your clients.
Note that because this is the aggregate TTFB, if you move traffic from one Region to another, TTFB for most locations is expected to improve but clients in some Regions could see no change or reduced performance..
To explore more latency improvement suggestions, including details at more granular levels (such as by client location), see the **Optimize** page.
# View health events and metrics in Internet Monitor (Health events page)
The **Health events** page in the Internet Monitor console provides a map of health events that impact the client locations and ASNs for your application. You can click circles on the map for more details about an event. The **Health events** tables lists locations that have been impacted by an event, and specifics about the impact.
**Internet traffic overview**
The **Internet traffic overview** map shows you the internet traffic and health events that are specific to the locations and ASNs that your clients access your application from. The countries that are gray on the map are those that include traffic for your application.
Each circle on the map indicates a health event in an area, for a time period that you select. Internet Monitor creates health events when it detects a problem, at a specific (but customizable) threshold, with connectivity between one of your resources hosted in AWS and a city-network where a client is accessing your application.
Choose a circle on the map to display more details about the health event for that location. In addition, for clusters that have health events, you can see detailed information in the **Health events** table below the map.
Note that Internet Monitor creates health events in a monitor when it determines that an event has significant impact on your application. The map is blank if there aren't any health events that exceed the threshold for impact on traffic for your client locations in the time period that you've selected. For more information, see [When Internet Monitor creates and resolves health events](CloudWatch-IM-inside-internet-monitor.md#IMHealthEventStartStop).
**Health events**
The **Health events** table lists client locations that have been affected by health events, along with information about the events. The following columns are included in the table.
[\[See the AWS documentation website for more details\]](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/CloudWatch-IM-Health-events.html)
If you choose one of the client locations in the **Health events** table, you can see more details about the health event at that location. For example, you can see when the event started, when it ended, and the local traffic impact.
**Network path visualization**
If Internet Monitor has finished impairment analysis for an event, you can view **Network path visualization** to see the full network path for traffic to a client location. The full path shows you each node along the network path for your application for the health event, between the AWS location and the client, for a client-location pair.
When Internet Monitor has determined the cause of an impairment, Internet Monitor adds a dashed red circle around the node. Impairments can be caused by ASNs, typically internet service providers (ISPs), or the cause can be AWS. If there were multiple causes for an impairment, multiple nodes are circled.
# Analyze historical data in Internet Monitor (Analyze page)
On the **Analyze** page in the Internet Monitor console, you can view your application's the top client locations for the traffic that you monitor, by traffic volume. You can also view graphs showing performance and availability scores for your traffic over time, as well as graphs of other internet traffic metrics for your application's monitored traffic.
To start exploring Internet Monitor data for your application traffic, select a time period. Then, choose a specific geographical location, such a city, and (optionally) other filters. Internet Monitor applies the filters to your data, and then you can see graphs of the data that show measurements for your application. The graphs included on the **Analyze** page include your application's performance score, availability score, monitored bytes transferred (for VPCs, Network Load Balancers, and CloudFront distributions) or client connection counts (for WorkSpaces directories), and round-trip time (RTT) for your application over time.
The options at the top of the **Analyze** page determine the timeframe and types of traffic shown in the graphs on the page. You can filter by client locations or ASN, or choose to show traffic graphs at a specific granularity (the default is city level).
**Top client locations**
The **Top client locations** graph displays your top monitored traffic locations, by default. You can choose another field to sort the graph by, or you can sort the graph in other ways, for example, by lowest traffic locations.
The filters that you choose for the page determine the Regions, timeframe, and so on for the locations.
**Traffic health scores**
This section shows you graphs of traffic health scores and metrics for your monitored traffic. These graphs reflect data for the filters that you choose at the top of the page.
The **Traffic health scores** graph shows you performance and availability information for your local and overall traffic by calling out health events that have impacted your monitored client traffic. AWS has substantial historical data about internet performance and availability for network traffic between geographic locations for different ASNs and AWS services. Internet Monitor uses the connectivity data that AWS has captured from its global networking footprint to calculate a baseline of performance and availability for internet traffic. This is the same data that we use at AWS to monitor our own internet uptime and availability.
With those measurements as a baseline, Internet Monitor can detect when the performance and availability for your application has dropped, compared to the baseline. To make it easier to see those drops, we report that information to you as a performance score and an availability score. For more information, see [How AWS calculates performance and availability scores](CloudWatch-IM-inside-internet-monitor.md#IMExperienceScores).
Additional graphs show the monitored bytes transferred (for VPCs, Network Load Balancers, and CloudFront distributions) or client connection counts (for WorkSpaces directories), and round-trip time (RTT) for your application traffic.
Note that when round-trip time (RTT) is aggregated across end-user locations, the value is weighted by the amount of your traffic that is driven by each client location. For example, with two client locations, one serving 90% of traffic with a 5 ms RTT, and the other serving 10% of traffic with a 10 ms RTT, the result is an aggregated RTT of 5.5 ms (which comes from 5 ms \$1 0.9 \$1 10 ms \$1 0.1).
You can also explore the internet measurements that Internet Monitor stores for your monitored traffic by using CloudWatch tools or other methods. For more information, see [Exploring your data with CloudWatch tools and the Internet Monitor query interface](CloudWatch-IM-view-cw-tools.md). In addition, you can create CloudWatch alarms based on Internet Monitor data, for example, to notify you of health events. For more information, see [Create alarms with Internet Monitor](CloudWatch-IM-create-alarm.md).
# Get suggestions to optimize application performance in Internet Monitor (Optimize page)
Use the **Optimize** page in the Internet Monitor console to get suggestions for how to optimize application performance for your clients. Internet Monitor evaluates your monitored application traffic, and determines if you can reduce latency by changing the AWS Regions that you've configured for your application. Optionally, you can also view latency changes if you choose to include Amazon CloudFront in the suggestions.
You can review suggestions for your application's top Regions by traffic volume, or for top client locations, also by traffic volume.
****Suggestions to reduce latency for top Regions****
To help you quickly understand your best options for reducing latency for your clients, Internet Monitor automatically provides suggestions for improving latency in your application for your top Regions (by traffic volume).
You can also explore configuration changes for all the Regions where your application serves clients. This includes getting details about each suggested change at deeper levels of granularity, for example, by specific client location. To explore all Regional configurations and expected latency changes for your application, choose **Optimization suggestions for all Regions**.
****Suggestions to reduce latency for all Regions****
To explore suggestions for reducing latency for all Regions where clients access your application, choose **Optimization suggestions for all Regions** to open a new dashboard page. On this page, you can select different Regions to configure, with the option of including CloudFront as a configuration comparison, and then compare the times to first byte (TTFBs) for each selected configuration.
Then, for each comparison, you can also see a table with at a more granular level (by client location), with the average expected TTFB for each one.
****Suggestions to reduce latency for top locations****
Internet Monitor also provides suggestions for reducing application latency for your clients by specific location. When the table lists multiple suggestions for the same location, expand the city location for that row to see details.
Be aware that if you change a configuration to use a different Region or to use CloudFront, latency improvements can vary by client location. For example, latency might improve for some locations, but stay the same or worsen for others.
****Suggestions to reduce latency by updating routing configurations****
Note: These suggestions are only relevant for application traffic to Regional load balancers. The table is not shown for monitors that you create for CloudFront distributions or WorkSpaces resources.
With Internet Monitor, you can view information about latency toward AWS locations for IPv4 IP prefixes that access your application using different DNS resolvers (typically ISPs). Using this information, you can take steps to reduce latency for specific groups of users by routing a set of IP address prefixes, specified by a CIDR collection, to your endpoints in a Region that results in lower latency for your users. If you don't already have a CIDR collection for the prefixes, you can go to Amazon Route 53 to create one. Then, you can update your routing in Route 53 to route IP addresses in the collection to a specific Region.
If you want to create a CIDR collection for a set of IP address prefixes, you can easily do so by selecting a row or rows that includes the IP prefixes that you want, and then choosing **Add to CIDR collection**. Then, in the Route 53 console, you can configure a routing policy that routes IP addresses in the collection to the Region with lower latency for your application.
To learn more about IP-based routing in Route 53, see [IP-based routing](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/routing-policy-ipbased.html).
By viewing the suggestions on this page, you can start planning configurations and deployments that can improve performance for your clients. Note that you might see a dash (-) instead of a value in a column, when data is not available to display.
For more information about TTFB calculations, see [AWS calculations for TTFB and latency](CloudWatch-IM-inside-internet-monitor.md#IMCalculateTTFB). To review a specific example of how to improve performance, see [ Using Internet Monitor for a Better Gaming Experience](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/gametech/using-cloudwatch-internet-monitor-for-a-better-gaming-experience/).
# Monitoring details in Internet Monitor (Configure page)
On the **Configure** page, you can see details about your monitor, including a list of resources that you monitor traffic for and the thresholds for when health events are triggered. You can also explore and compare values for the traffic percentage for your monitor, and its impact on how many city-networks are included for (monitored by) your monitor. Finally, you can view information about measurements that are published to an Amazon S3 bucket.
You can configure a monitor to change most options, such as the percentage of traffic to monitor. For more information, see [Configure your monitor](#IMUpdateMonitorConfig).
## Monitor details
The **Monitor details** section includes basic information about your monitor, including the name, the percentage of traffic currently being monitored for your application, a city-networks maximum limit (if you've set one), and status information about the monitor.
The following explains the values that you might see for **Status** and **Status info** (data processing status).
| Status | Description |
| --- | --- |
| Active | Monitor is created and active. |
| Pending | Monitor is currently being created and is not yet active. |
| Inactive | Monitor is created but has been set to inactive. |
| Error | Monitor is in an error state. |
| Status details (Data processing status) | Description |
| --- | --- |
| OK | Monitor is actively processing data. |
| Inactive | Monitor is inactive and is not processing data. |
| Collecting data | Monitor is actively collecting data. |
| Insufficient data | Monitor is actively processing data, but there aren't enough datapoints to produce insights. |
| Fault access CloudWatch | Monitor has encountered a problem delivering CloudWatch metrics data and log events. |
## Health event thresholds
In this section, you can see the current thresholds for health events that are configured for this monitor. If you haven't configured any custom thresholds, the values shown here are the default values.
By default, health events are not triggered based on local thresholds. If local health event thresholds would be useful for your Internet Monitor scenario, you can enable the option and specify the thresholds to use.
You can learn more about how health event thresholds work, and review the potential impact of adding local thresholds or changing existing thresholds. For more information, see [Change health event thresholds](CloudWatch-IM-get-started.change-threshold.md#IMUpdateThresholdFromOverview).
## Traffic coverage
In this section, you can explore options for the traffic coverage for your monitor. When you change the traffic percentage for a monitor, Internet Monitor monitors different amounts of application traffic. If you set a traffic percentage to less than 100% (100% is the default value), some portion of the city-networks that your clients use to access your application might not be monitored. By exploring the impact of different traffic percentage values, you can see how different values that you might set would impact your city-networks coverage.
The **Total monitored city-networks** graph shows you how many city-networks are currently monitored, and how many would be monitored if you set the traffic percentage to 100%. To view different traffic percentage values on the graph, select percentages in the drop-down menu.
After you explore the options, you can change the traffic percentage to monitor by choosing **Update monitoring coverage**.
If you want to set a maximum city-networks limit, at the top of the page, choose **Edit monitor**. Then, under **Advanced options**, set a maximum city-networks value.
## Configure your monitor
As on every page in the Internet Monitor dashboard, you can choose **Edit monitor** to change options for your monitor, including adding or removing resources. For details about how to update the following configuration options, see the provided links.
**View health event thresholds**
In this section, you can see the current thresholds for health events that are configured for this monitor.
To update health thresholds, see [Change health event thresholds](CloudWatch-IM-get-started.change-threshold.md#IMUpdateThresholdFromOverview).
**View and evaluate traffic coverage**
In this section, you can compare the effect of changing the percentage of traffic that you monitor for your application on the number of city-networks that are included (for monitoring) when you choose different percentage values.
You can also change the percentage of traffic that you monitor, or change the limit for the number of city-networks your monitor includes. To change the percentage of traffic, choose **Update monitoring coverage**.
For detailed steps and information, see [Explore changing your application traffic percentage](IMTrafficPercentage.md#IMExploreTrafficPercentage).
**Configuration details for publishing internet measurements to Amazon S3**
If you have configured Internet Monitor to publish internet measurements for your monitor to an Amazon S3 bucket, the information about your configuration is shown here.
To configure this option, see [Publishing internet measurements to S3](CloudWatch-IM-get-started.Publish-to-S3.md#IMPublishToS3).