AWS CloudWatch

AWS CloudWatch

AWS CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service that provides actionable insights for applications, system performance, and infrastructure resources.

🔹 Key Features

  • Metrics Collection
    Collects and tracks metrics from AWS services, applications, and custom sources.

  • Logs Monitoring
    Ingests, stores, and analyzes logs from applications, Lambda, EC2, and other services.

  • Alarms
    Set thresholds on metrics to trigger notifications or automated actions.

  • Dashboards
    Create custom, real-time dashboards for visibility into system performance.

  • Events
    Detect and respond to changes in AWS resources using EventBridge.

  • Application Insights
    Provides automated setup and monitoring for enterprise applications.

🔹 Common Use Cases

  1. Monitor EC2 instance CPU utilization.
  2. Track Lambda function errors.
  3. Set alarms for RDS free storage space.
  4. Analyze application logs for errors.
  5. Automate responses to infrastructure changes.

🔹 CloudWatch Components

  • Metrics → Numeric data points from resources.
  • Alarms → Actions triggered when a threshold is breached.
  • Logs → Centralized logging for analysis and troubleshooting.
  • Dashboards → Visualizations for metrics and logs.
  • Events (EventBridge) → Reacts to changes and routes events.

🔹 Example: Creating an Alarm (CLI)

aws cloudwatch put-metric-alarm \
  --alarm-name "HighCPUUtilization" \
  --metric-name CPUUtilization \
  --namespace AWS/EC2 \
  --statistic Average \
  --period 300 \
  --threshold 80 \
  --comparison-operator GreaterThanThreshold \
  --dimensions Name=InstanceId,Value=i-0123456789abcdef0 \
  --evaluation-periods 2 \
  --alarm-actions arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:111122223333:NotifyMe