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Logging and Monitoring

Monitoring CloudFront behavior and website performance is an important part of maintaining a production-ready static hosting environment. This section explains how to enable access logging, view performance metrics, and configure cost-efficient log retention.

  1. Open the CloudFront console and select your distribution.

  2. Go to Settings and enable Access logging.

  3. Choose an S3 bucket for log storage.

  4. You can use an existing bucket or create a dedicated one.

  5. Recommended naming pattern: example-com-cf-logs

  6. (Optional) Specify a log prefix, for example:

    logs/

    CloudFront access logs will begin appearing in the selected S3 bucket within a few minutes.

  7. Open CloudWatch to view CloudFront metrics.
    Important metrics to monitor include:

    Metric Purpose
    Requests Overall traffic volume
    BytesDownloaded Data transfer usage
    4xxErrorRate Missing files or client errors
    5xxErrorRate Backend or CloudFront issues
    CacheHitRate CDN efficiency

  8. (Optional) Create CloudWatch alarms to detect issues:

    Alarm Suggested Threshold
    5xx error rate > 1% for 5 minutes
    4xx error rate > 10% for 10 minutes
    Cache hit rate < 70%

    To create an alarm:

    1. Go to CloudWatch → Alarms → Create alarm
    2. Select Metrics → CloudFront → By Distribution
    3. Choose the metric (e.g., 5xxErrorRate)
    4. Set a threshold
    5. Configure notifications (SNS, email, etc.)

  9. (Optional) Enable S3 Server Access Logging if you need object-level traceability.

    1. Open the S3 bucket
    2. Go to Properties
    3. Enable Server access logging
    4. Choose a different bucket for storing logs

    Warning

    S3 access logs grow quickly. Use lifecycle rules to control storage costs.

  10. Configure lifecycle rules for your logging bucket:

    Action Timeframe
    Transition to Glacier Deep Archive After 30–60 days
    Delete permanently After 365–730 days

  11. (Optional) Set up dashboards for deeper monitoring:

    Tool Purpose
    CloudWatch Dashboards Live metric visualization
    Athena + S3 logs SQL analysis of access logs
    QuickSight Analytical dashboards
    Third-party tools Datadog, New Relic, Grafana

Verification Checklist

Item Status
CloudFront access logging enabled ✔
CloudWatch alarms configured ✔
Lifecycle rules created for log bucket ✔
Optional dashboards configured ⭕ Optional