Implementing Logging, Monitoring & Alerting in AWS

WEBVTT (upbeat music) Welcome in, I'm your host Lauren Deal and I'll be your learner advocate as we go along learning along with you and asking Jill West all the questions you may have at home. In fact, you might remember me from your AWS cloud practitioner exam and I'll be learning along with you for this series with Jill as we talk about AWS security in logging, monitoring and alerting. So welcome to the show, Jill, tell us a little bit about yourself and welcome in. - Yeah and congratulations on passing the cloud practitioner certification. Got some certifications going around. So my name is Jill West, I am an instructor at a Georgia technical college. I'm also a student, I'm working on my second master's degree. My background is actually in education. So I've taught everything from kindergarten all the way through higher education. I've taught in a lot of different learning environments and a lot of different learning approaches. And then about years ago, I started working on writing IT content for Cengage. So I started with the CompTIA A plus book and then I moved over to the CompTIA network plus book and that one's mine now, I'm running with that. And then about six years ago, I got to start writing the CompTIA cloud plus book for Cengage. That's where our beautiful book comes in here. This is the second edition. We're already starting to talk about the third edition and I have lots of IT certifications, I kind of lost track. I have most of the CompTIA certifications, a few Microsoft certs and then three AWS certs and still working already on the next one. So it's just a really exciting time to be teaching cloud in IT. Cloud is basically revolutionized IT and so it's also revolutionizing teaching in IT. So we're having to reinvent how we teach our IT classes. We can't teach it the same way we've been doing all along because everything has changed. So we have to figure out how to incorporate cloud into everything. So we're having to learn this cloud as we go and then figure out how to teach it. I'm just really excited. This is a great time to be a teacher in higher ed in IT. - Yes, it is and I'm excited that you are in great hands with Jill West because as you can see, she's got a ton of experience and a lot of passion when it comes to AWS and cloud. And so what are we gonna be learning about in this course and who might be the perfect audience for this? - So coming into this course, this particular module, the background that you would need, I would say you probably need to have at least the equivalent knowledge of the CompTIA trifecta. So A plus, network plus and security plus. You do not necessarily need to have taken those exams or passed them even if you did take them, but you do need to have equivalent knowledge so that you don't have major gaps in those areas that you would need to understand before going into AWS. You probably will want another cybersecurity certification on top of that or equivalent knowledge, whether that's like CYSA plus or Pintest plus, something from CompTIA or from one of the other certifying bodies that has some sort of equivalent knowledge but something beyond security plus so you're not just getting started with cybersecurity. AWS says that you really should have about five years of experience in IT security, designing and implementing security solutions, and you should have at least two years experience securing workloads in AWS. This is not counting two years from the time you made your first trial account in AWS. This is two years of actually working to secure workloads in AWS so that this information will really make sense and resonate with you. If you don't have this level of knowledge, there are gaps that you can fill in along the way. We'll point out things like you really should know this. If you need more information, go look up this topic or go look up that topic. ITPro of course has lots of videos you could refer to to fill in those gaps, and then there are lots of other sources as well that are great, but this would be where you would jump in and be able to make the most sense of it the fastest and make the most progress. - Well, this is gonna be a jam-packed course, and so we're gonna be covering a lot of things, like Jill said. Now, how are we going to structure this course, Jill? - So this course has two major sections within it, and we start with logging. So we'll do an overview of logging. We'll then look at logging system design, where you store logging, how you analyze logs. We'll do a little bit of troubleshooting. So then we have a second section that's on monitoring and alerting together. So again, we have an overview, and then we have the monitoring system design, the services that we'll be using in AWS, and then how do we customize our monitoring, and how do we audit the things that we need to be watching, and we'll finish up with another troubleshooting episode. - Well, Jill, I know that you're excited to get started. I am too. We're gonna be learning so much, and so what do you say we jump into our first episode and get started? See you there. (gentle music)