Discover Logs & Health Checks

What is Elastic Beanstalk?

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services. You can simply upload your code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment from capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling to application health monitoring. At the same time, you retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application and can access the underlying resources at any time https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/?c=7&pt=8.

AWS provides details regarding the condition or “health” of your deployed application in the form of Logs and Health Checks. Health checks will tell you whether or not your application is properly deployed and ready to receive requests. You can also configure your beanstalk to send information. When your beanstalk is unhealthy, the logs can give you some hints as to why. We’re going to look at some logs now.

Start off by going to awslogin.byu.edu and login using your credentials.

Enter “Elastic Beanstalk” in the “Find Services” bar and navigate to the Elastic Beanstalk page. Search and select the “beanstalk” of the application that you’ve created, which should be titled --favorite-color. If you don't have one, any other application should do.

You should see something similar to the following:

Notice the big ol’ green check mark in this image (and hopefully on your own application page as well). This indicates that your application is deployed and “healthy”. There are several possible health check statuses varying from “OK” to “Severe”. Health statuses can be found at the bottom of this page.

Now to see what’s happening with your application, select “Logs” on the left side of your screen.

Click on “Request Logs”, then “Last 100 Lines”, then “Download”.

The result should look something like this, although the messages on your screen may vary:

These are your logs!

Congratulations! This is the easiest way for you to look at your logs and see what’s happening with your application. If these logs don’t have the information you’re looking for, you may also download the Full Logs. You can learn more about logs here.

Health Statuses