CloudWatch & SNS Integration for Real-Time Error Alerts in Dev and Prod Environments

[git-user-9]

This pull request implements centralized logging, monitoring, and alerting for EC2-based deployments using AWS CloudWatch and SNS, fulfilling the requirements of Assignment 5.

---

✅ CloudWatch Logs and Metrics

• Application logs are collected and pushed to CloudWatch under stage-specific log groups such as:

  /aws/ec2/dev-app-logs
  /aws/ec2/prod-app-logs
  

• A CloudWatch Log Metric Filter tracks error-level log entries:

  Filter Pattern: "Error"
  Filter Pattern: "Exception"
  

• Corresponding CloudWatch Alarms are configured to trigger based on the above metric.

---

🔔 SNS-Based Alerting

• An SNS Topic is created to dispatch notifications when alarms are triggered.
• An email subscription is attached, which receives alerts for error logs.
• Email endpoint is passed via Terraform variable and stored securely.

---

☁️ Free Tier Optimization

• The solution uses:

  • Only 1 log group per environment.
  • 2 alarm, within the AWS Free Tier limit of 3 CloudWatch alarms per month.

• Log data is kept minimal (few KBs) and uses short retention to avoid costs.

---

📥 Example Outputs and Alerts

Below is a screenshot of the email alert received via SNS when an Error log is detected:

Below is screenshot of AWS CloudWatch alarms

CloudWatch log groups showing stage-specific separation:

dev log group:

prod log group:

Below is AWS SNS topic:

---

🔍 Validation

• Verified that a test echo "Error" or `echo "Exception"' in EC2 logs correctly triggers the alarm and sends the email.
• CloudWatch insights confirm metric filter accuracy.

---

This feature/assignment [devops/a5] continues from [devops/a4] and has been raised on [main] to maintain a clear history of each assignment.