Intelligent Health Checks - AWS

Gremlin supports Intelligent Health Checks for AWS services. When enabled, Gremlin automatically creates a set of Health Checks for your AWS service, monitors key metrics (request rate, throughput, and latency), and sets error thresholds using the service’s baseline performance. This lets you create Health Checks and start testing services without needing an observability tool.

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How it works

Gremlin uses Amazon CloudWatch to monitor your service in real time. To do this, you must first map your service to an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB). Gremlin will use the ELB's metrics as an indicator of service health while running tests.

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Enabling AWS Intelligent Health Checks

To enable AWS Intelligent Health Checks:

1. In the Gremlin web app, navigate to the service you want to enable Health Checks for.
2. Select Settings, then Health Checks.
3. Under Intelligent Health Checks, click on the Type drop-down menu and select AWS. Then, click + Add.
   
4. Select the AWS account where your service's ELB is deployed. If you haven't yet authenticated with AWS, follow the steps in Adding an AWS account in our AWS integration guide. Then, click Next.
5. Select the ELB that you want to map to this service. Gremlin will use the selected ELB's CloudWatch metrics as an indicator of service health. If Gremlin detects unusual changes in the ELB's throughput, latency, or error rate, it will halt the test running on the service and revert the impact. Once you've selected an ELB, click Next.
6. Click the checkbox next to Use Intelligent Health Checks for this service and click Save.

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Disabling AWS Intelligent Health Checks

To disable Intelligent Health Checks for an AWS service:

1. Navigate to the service you want to disable Intelligent Health Checks for.
2. Select Settings > Health Checks.
3. Under Intelligent Health Checks, click the Delete button next to one of the Intelligent Health Checks you want to disable. Gremlin will delete the other two Health Checks associated with the one you selected.
4. Uncheck the checkbox next to the application that you no longer want to monitor.
5. Click Submit.

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