The CloudWatch management console gives us the ability to gain insight into the performance of ELB. Since the load balancer distributes the load across multiple instances, having the ability to view information on the load of our application at any given time is crucial.

One of the most important metrics when monitoring an ELB is latency of the response from our EC2 instances. The performance of our application is directly tied to the performance of the backend. The ability of the backend to respond as quickly as possible is going to increase customer satisfaction. Several studies have been done correlating the performance impacts of latency on user behavior. Amazon has conducted a latency study of how latency affects sales, available on their website. Every 10 milliseconds in latency, up to 100 milliseconds, was directly responsible for decreasing overall sales...