Gravitating to AWS’ Arm Processor

Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Graviton CPU, an Arm-based processor, is gaining popularity as “[h]alf of all instances spun up on Amazon Web Services over the past two years used Graviton,” according to the article by Andy Patrizio on Network World titled “Graviton progress: 50% of new AWS instances run on Amazon custom silicon.” As these new processors rise in popularity and AWS remains a widely used cloud platform, you want to ensure you are monitoring your AWS assets with a reliable IT infrastructure monitoring solution like Nagios XI so you can keep track of their status. In this article, you’ll get a general overview of the Graviton CPU and also learn how you can monitor your AWS assets with XI.

What’s Different about the Graviton CPU?

Patrizio’s article provides a few reasons as to why more AWS instances are utilizing the Graviton CPU over the x86 processor. Some of the benefits of using Graviton CPUs are they “cost up to 20% less and use up to 60% less energy than comparable EC2 instances on x86, and they are up to 40% more cost-effective than x86,” according to Patrizio.

As Amazon has released new versions of the Graviton CPU, the company has significantly improved the performance of the processor. From Graviton3 to Graviton4, which Amazon launched in July 2024, the processor gained “30% better computing power, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth,” according to the article. One of the noteworthy technical improvements Patrizio mentioned for the new Graviton4 processor, also called R8g, is that it can handle as much as 8GB of memory for each virtual processor a user has as well as support up to 192 processors.

Another difference stated in the article that makes the Graviton CPU unique is the fact it is made by Amazon, a hyperscaler without any prior experience creating custom silicon. However, other hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia have also created their own personalized Arm-based CPUs, according to Patrizio, so AWS is not the only hyperscaler offering this type of processor. While the Graviton CPU may not be the only processor out there like it, the article points out that its use is certainly on the rise.

Using and Monitoring AWS with Nagios

The Graviton4 processor from Amazon is new, but it’s not a new practice to use AWS in your IT environment or monitor your AWS assets. Nagios XI not only enables you to utilize AWS for installation, but it also can monitor AWS services as well. XI gives you flexibility when it comes to choosing how you deploy it so it’s able to fit into the requirements of your organization. You can install it with VMware, Hyper-V, Linux, or you can even install it in AWS. To show you how to accomplish the latter, we created a detailed tutorial that walks you through how to install XI in AWS with a RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 9 virtual machine.

If you are using AWS, though, the greater value comes in for you through XI’s ability to monitor AWS services such as Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) and Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service). XI comes with over 80 built-in Configuration Wizards that allow you to easily configure a wide variety of devices for monitoring, and two of those Wizards are for Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, respectively.

When you monitor Amazon S3 with XI, you are able measure metrics like bucket size, the number of objects, all/get/put requests, delete requests, head/post/list requests, the amount of bytes downloaded or uploaded, total request latency, first byte latency, 4XX errors, and 5XX errors. Monitoring Amazon EC2 allows you to keep track of CPU credit usage, CPU credit balance, CPU utilization, disk read/write operations, disk read/write bytes, network in/out, as well as network packets in/out. This in-depth insight into both services gives you the ability to more easily keep track of their status to ensure everything is running smoothly.

Conclusion

AWS’ Graviton CPU is making waves as more users begin to utilize it, and there are many benefits to using this processor that can help with increasing efficiency and decreasing costs, as stated in the article. While more people are starting to use this processor, many organizations already use AWS services as a key part of their IT environments. Since these services are highly important, it’s essential to monitor them with an IT monitoring solution like Nagios XI that can provide you with insight into an array of valuable metrics. Armed with this valuable data, you can feel confident that you’re able to quickly jump into action if an issue arises in your AWS services.