What is Amazon CloudWatch?Amazon CloudWatch is a component of Amazon Web Services that provides monitoring for AWS resources and the customer applications running on the Amazon infrastructure. Show
CloudWatch enables real-time monitoring of AWS resources such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) instances. The application automatically collects and provides metrics for CPU utilization, latency and request counts. Users can also stipulate additional metrics to be monitored, such as memory usage, transaction volumes or error rates. Users can access CloudWatch functions through an application programming interface (API), command-line tools, one of the AWS software development kits or the AWS Management Console. The CloudWatch interface provides current statistics that users can view in graph format. Users can set notification alarms to be sent when something being monitored surpasses a specified threshold. The app can also detect and shut down unused or underused EC2 instances. Amazon CloudWatch is designed for AWS users, including DevOps engineers, IT managers, cloud developers and site reliability engineers. CloudWatch featuresCloudWatch enables users to collect and view monitoring data for AWS infrastructures in a single platform. CloudWatch includes specific features for data collection, monitoring, automated actions, analysis and compliance and security. What does Amazon CloudWatch do?
CloudWatch vs. CloudTrailCloudWatch and CloudTrail are both monitoring services for AWS resources and applications. AWS CloudWatch is a service that monitors system performance for AWS applications and resources, and AWS CloudTrail is a web service that monitors the activity within the AWS environment through tracking API calls. CloudTrail provides a detailed log of all actions in the AWS system, and helps users track user activity and changes, monitoring the trail of activity, hence the name. AWS CloudTrail provides information on the who, what, where and when of activity in the AWS account and environment. Benefits of CloudWatchCloudWatch offers several benefits for organizations using AWS resources and applications. These are related to the information that CloudWatch can provide, as well as its intuitive interface, and include the following.
Challenges of CloudWatchrelated to the use of AWS CloudWatch include the following:
Amazon CloudWatch pricingCloudWatch is available in free and paid tiers. The free tier includes limited monitoring metrics, API requests, dashboards, alarms, log data, events, contributor insights and canary runs. Like other cloud services, the paid tier follows a pay-as-you-go pricing structure that is billed monthly. Pricing is based on the quantity of metrics, APIs and metric streams used. See the AWS CloudWatch pricing page for a comprehensive breakdown with a pricing calculator and pricing examples. Amazon CloudWatch use casesCloudWatch collects data for operational and monitoring purposes with a unified view and can deploy automated responses to monitored metrics reaching a specified threshold. More broadly, CloudWatch is used for the following tasks:
For more information on metrics in cloud monitoring, read here. Learn how AWS CloudWatch compares to other cloud monitoring services.
This was last updated in May 2021 Continue Reading About AWS CloudWatch
Dig Deeper on AWS infrastructure
Which of the following are features of Amazon CloudWatch logs?CloudWatch enables you to monitor your complete stack (applications, infrastructure, network, and services) and use alarms, logs, and events data to take automated actions and reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR). This frees up important resources and allows you to focus on building applications and business value.
Where are AWS CloudWatch logs stored?Flow logs are stored in an Amazon CloudWatch log group, in the same region as your Amazon Connect instance. This log group is created automatically when Enable flow logging is turned on for your instance.
Which AWS cloud service allows you to gain systemYou can use Amazon CloudWatch to gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health. You can use these insights to react and keep your application running smoothly.
Which AWS service sends data to CloudWatch every minute by default?By default, Amazon EC2 sends metric data to CloudWatch in 5-minute periods. To send metric data for your instance to CloudWatch in 1-minute periods, you can enable detailed monitoring on the instance.
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