Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring tool and observability tool that can be used by DevOps developers, site reliability engineers, SREs, and IT administrators. CloudWatch provides actionable insights and data to help you monitor and respond to system-wide performance changes and minimize resource usage. It also gives you a single view of your operational health. CloudWatch gathers logs, analytics and events to give you a single view of AWS resources and applications as well as services running on AWS and on-premises servers.
CloudWatch can help you keep your apps running smoothly. It can identify abnormal behavior, trigger alarms and analyze logs and metrics side-by, take automated actions and troubleshoot problems, and provide insights.
AWS CloudWatch
CloudWatch collects operational and monitoring data in the form logs, metrics and events and visualizes it using automated dashboards. This gives you one view of all your AWS resources, applications and services, on-premises or in the cloud. To get a better view of your resources’ health and performance, you can correlate logs and metrics. Machine learning can also be used to detect unusual metric behavior and generate alarms based on the thresholds for metric values.
CloudWatch can help you reduce Mean Time to Resolution. It allows you to monitor all aspects of your stack (applications and infrastructure) and take automated action based on alarms logs and events data (MTTR). CloudWatch saves time and allows you to concentrate on app development and adding value to your company.
AWS CloudWatch: Advantages
AWS CloudWatch offers many benefits.
1. Observability across all apps and infrastructure on one platform
Modern applications, such those built on microservices architectures generate a lot of data in the form of logs, metrics, and events. Amazon CloudWatch allows for you to quickly and efficiently resolve issues by combining data from all your AWS resources, apps, services, and services.
2. The simplest way to collect metrics in AWS or on-premises
CloudWatch makes it easy to keep track of your AWS resources. CloudWatch works with more than 70 AWS services including Amazon EC2, Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon S3, Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS. It automatically provides detailed 1-minute metrics as well as custom metrics with up-to 1-second granularity. This allows you to dig deeper into your logs for additional information. CloudWatch can be used in hybrid cloud architectures for monitoring on-premises resources using the CloudWatch Agent and API.
3. Boost operational efficiency and resource allocation
Amazon CloudWatch can be used to generate alarms or automate actions based upon predefined criteria, or machine learning algorithms that detect unusual activity. It can launch Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, or halt an instance to avoid overage billing. CloudWatch Events can also be used to initiate serverless workflows using AWS Lambda and Amazon SNS.
4. Get visibility and insight into your operations
To maximize performance and optimize resource use, you will need a single operational view, real-time data granularity, and historical reference. CloudWatch provides automated dashboards, 1-second data granularity, and up to 15-months of metric storage. You can also use metric math for operational and consumption insights. For example, you could aggregate usage across multiple EC2 instances.
5. Logs can be used for actionable information.
CloudWatch makes it easy to analyse, visualise, and visualize your logs to resolve operational issues. CloudWatch Logs insights only charges for the queries that you run. It adapts to your query complexity and log volume, providing instant results. CloudWatch Dashboards allows you to publish log-based metrics and create alarms. You can also correlate logs and metrics for operational visibility.
Amazon CloudWatch Features
Here are some features of Amazon CloudWatch.
1. Collect
You can easily collect and store logs with the Amazon CloudWatch Logs service. This allows you to quickly gather logs from your resources, apps, and services in near real time.
Built-in metrics take time to collect metrics from distributed apps (such as those built using microservices architectures). Amazon CloudWatch can collect default metrics from more than 70 AWS services, including Amazon EC2, Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon S3, Amazon ECS and AWS Lambda.
Amazon CloudWatch can be used to collect unique metrics from your apps.
2. Monitor
Unified operational view with dashboards. You can use Amazon CloudWatch dashboards for creating reusable graphs. This allows you to see all of your cloud resources in one place. You can quickly see the context and go from diagnosing the problem down to understanding the root cause by graphing metrics and log data on one dashboard.
Composite alarms: Amazon CloudWatch composite alarms combine multiple alarms to reduce alarm sound. If an application issue affects multiple resources, you will receive one alarm for the entire application and not one for each service component or resource.
High-resolution alarms. Amazon CloudWatch allows you to set a threshold for metrics, and have them trigger an alert. High-resolution alarms can be set up, you can choose a percentile to use as the statistic and you can decide whether to act or not.
Logs and metrics correlation: Applications and infrastructure resources generate logs and metrics that are used to correlate with each other.