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
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Which service can be used with Amazon CloudWatch to send notifications?Amazon CloudWatch uses Amazon SNS to send email. First, create and subscribe to an SNS topic. When you create a CloudWatch alarm, you can add this SNS topic to send an email notification when the alarm changes state. For more information, see the Amazon Simple Notification Service Getting Started Guide.
What service is provided by AWS CloudWatch?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.
Which of these methods are used to access CloudWatch?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.
What three AWS services can receive CloudWatch alarm notifications?Using Amazon CloudWatch alarms, you can set up metric thresholds and send alerts to Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). SNS can send notifications using e-mail, HTTP(S) endpoints, and Short Message Service (SMS) messages to mobile phones, and it can even trigger a Lambda function.
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