See more
What does AWS CloudWatch do?
CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, and visualizes it using automated dashboards so you can get a unified view of your AWS resources, applications, and services that run on AWS and on premises.
Is CloudWatch part of AWS?
Amazon CloudWatch is basically a metrics repository. An AWS service—such as Amazon EC2—puts metrics into the repository, and you retrieve statistics based on those metrics. If you put your own custom metrics into the repository, you can retrieve statistics on these metrics as well.
What is the difference between Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon CloudTrail?
The Difference between CloudWatch and CloudTrail CloudWatch focuses on the activity of AWS services and resources, reporting on their health and performance. On the other hand, CloudTrail is a log of all actions that have taken place inside your AWS environment.
What types of monitoring can Amazon CloudWatch be used for?
Amazon CloudWatch can monitor AWS resources such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon DynamoDB tables, and Amazon RDS DB instances, as well as custom metrics generated by your applications and services, and any log files your applications generate.
How do I check logs in CloudWatch?
To view log data Open the CloudWatch console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/ . In the navigation pane, choose Log groups. For Log Groups, choose the log group to view the streams. In the list of log groups, choose the name of the log group that you want to view.
What is AWS CloudTrail used for?
AWS CloudTrail enables auditing, security monitoring, and operational troubleshooting by tracking user activity and API usage. CloudTrail logs, continuously monitors, and retains account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure, giving you control over storage, analysis, and remediation actions.
What is the difference between CloudWatch logs and CloudWatch?
CloudWatch Logs reports on application logs, while CloudTrail Logs provide you specific information on what occurred in your AWS account. CloudWatch Events is a near real time stream of system events describing changes to your AWS resources. CloudTrail focuses more on AWS API calls made in your AWS account.
What are the CloudWatch metrics?
Metrics. Metrics are the fundamental concept in CloudWatch. A metric represents a time-ordered set of data points that are published to CloudWatch. Think of a metric as a variable to monitor, and the data points as representing the values of that variable over time.
How do I access AWS CloudWatch?
To sign in to the Amazon CloudWatch console Open the CloudWatch console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/ . If necessary, use the navigation bar to change the Region to the Region where you have your AWS resources.
How do I set up AWS CloudWatch?
Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/ . In the navigation pane, choose Instances. Select the instance and choose Actions, Monitor and troubleshoot, Manage CloudWatch alarms. On the Manage CloudWatch alarms detail page, under Add or edit alarm, select Create an alarm.
What is AWS CloudWatch agent?
The unified CloudWatch agent enables you to do the following: Collect internal system-level metrics from Amazon EC2 instances across operating systems. The metrics can include in-guest metrics, in addition to the metrics for EC2 instances.
Is AWS CloudWatch global or regional?
Amazon CloudWatch now includes cross-account cross-region dashboards, which enable you to create high level operational dashboards, and with one click, drill down into more specific dashboards in different AWS accounts without having to log in and out of different accounts or switch AWS Regions.
Benefits
Modern applications such as those running on microservices architectures generate large volumes of data in the form of metrics, logs, and events.
How it works
CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, and visualizes it using automated dashboards so you can get a unified view of your AWS resources, applications, and services that run in AWS and on-premises.
Use cases
Monitor key metrics and logs, visualize your application and infrastructure stack, create alarms, and correlate metrics and logs to understand and resolve root cause of performance issues in your AWS resources. This includes monitoring your container ecosystem across Amazon ECS, AWS Fargate, Amazon EKS, and Kubernetes.
Customers
Customers use Amazon CloudWatch to improve operational performance, optimize resource allocation, and reduce MTTR. To learn more about how organizations use Amazon CloudWatch, visit our customers page.
Collect
The Amazon CloudWatch Logs service allows you to collect and store logs from your resources, applications, and services in near real-time. There are three main categories of logs 1) Vended logs. These are natively published by AWS services on behalf of the customer.
Monitor
Amazon CloudWatch dashboards enable you to create re-usable graphs and visualize your cloud resources and applications in a unified view. You can graph metrics and logs data side by side in a single dashboard to quickly get the context and go from diagnosing the problem to understanding the root cause.
Analyze
Amazon CloudWatch allows you to monitor trends and seasonality with 15 months of metric data (storage and retention). This data allows you to perform historical analysis to fine-tune resource utilization.
Compliance and Security
Amazon CloudWatch is integrated with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) so that you can control which users and resources have permission to access your data and how they can access it.
Features
Query your log data – You can use CloudWatch Logs Insights to interactively search and analyze your log data. You can perform queries to help you more efficiently and effectively respond to operational issues. CloudWatch Logs Insights includes a purpose-built query language with a few simple but powerful commands.
Pricing
When you sign up for AWS, you can get started with CloudWatch Logs for free using the AWS Free Tier .
Concepts
Before you begin using CloudWatch Events, you should understand the following concepts:
Related AWS Services
The following services are used in conjunction with CloudWatch Events:
