Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service offered by AWS. It provides real-time monitoring for AWS cloud resources and applications, helping you track performance metrics, logs, and set alarms. CloudWatch is widely used for both resource monitoring and operational health tracking, ensuring your systems run smoothly by proactively detecting and responding to issues.
Key Features of CloudWatch:
Metrics:
CloudWatch Metrics collect data points about your AWS resources and applications, including EC2 instances, RDS databases, Lambda functions, S3 buckets, and more.
Metrics can include CPU utilization, memory usage, disk I/O, request counts, etc.
You can view these metrics in CloudWatch Dashboards to get real-time insights into system performance.
Logs:
CloudWatch Logs allows you to collect and store log files from your AWS resources and applications. For example, you can collect logs from EC2 instances, Lambda functions, or even custom applications.
Logs can be analyzed in real time, helping to troubleshoot issues or improve application performance.
You can also set up log groups and log streams to organize your logs by function or service.
Alarms:
CloudWatch Alarms help you set thresholds for specific metrics, and when those thresholds are breached (e.g., CPU utilization exceeds 80%), CloudWatch will send notifications.
Alarms can trigger actions, such as sending an Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service) message, auto-scaling actions, or running AWS Lambda functions.
Events:
CloudWatch Events allows you to track system events in real time, such as changes in your AWS resources or specific application states.
It is useful for building automated workflows and triggering actions based on events. For example, you could automatically respond to changes in resource states (e.g., EC2 instance termination) by invoking Lambda functions or triggering an SNS notification.
Dashboards:
CloudWatch Dashboards let you create custom, graphical views of your AWS resources’ performance metrics.
You can display different CloudWatch metrics and logs in the same dashboard for easy tracking of system performance and health.
Insights (CloudWatch Logs Insights):
CloudWatch Logs Insights provides powerful query capabilities to search and analyze your log data.