What is AWS CloudWatch?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) CloudWatch is a monitoring service designed for developers, system operators, site reliability engineers, and IT managers. It provides actionable insights to monitor applications, understand and respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and gain a unified view of operational health. CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, providing a consolidated view of AWS resources, applications, and services that run on AWS and on-premises servers.
How does AWS CloudWatch work?
CloudWatch collects log and metric data from various AWS resources. Users can set up alarms and notifications for any metric collected to react to system and application performance aberrations proactively. It integrates with more than 70 AWS services, and you can publish your custom metrics through the PutMetricData API. This data can be viewed graphically on the CloudWatch console.
CloudWatch allows users to build dashboards, set automated actions, troubleshoot issues, and discover insights to keep their applications performing smoothly. CloudWatch automatically reacts to changes in your AWS resources according to the thresholds set by users for specific metrics like CPU utilization, latency, or disk I/O usage.
Use Cases
Application Monitoring: CloudWatch can monitor your applications' real-time performance and health. By setting up alarms, you can be alerted to issues that may impact application performance.
Resource Optimization: AWS CloudWatch maintains efficiency by allowing users to track the usage and performance of AWS resources. This helps in making informed decisions about resource allocation and controlling costs.
Log Aggregation and Analysis: CloudWatch Logs conveniently consolidate log data from all your systems, applications, and AWS services. This data can be further analyzed for patterns and insights.
Security and Compliance Auditing: With CloudWatch, users can monitor API calls and network traffic for potential security breaches and non-compliant configurations. It can vastly enhance an organization's security posture by configuring real-time alerts for suspicious activities.
Learn More about AWS Services:
AWS AppSync: AWS AppSync is an Amazon Web Service for developing scalable, secure, real-time applications. It employs GraphQL for data querying, manipulation, and integration from multiple data sources.
AWS CloudCraft: CloudCraft is an Amazon web-based tool for designing cloud architecture diagrams. It's primarily used by architects, developers, and system administrators to visualize their cloud infrastructure.
AWS Code Deploy: AWS CodeDeploy is a fully managed deployment service that automates software deployments to compute services like Amazon EC2 instances, AWS Lambda functions, or others running on-premises.
AWS SNS: This article examines AWS SNS, a managed publish-subscribe messaging service from Amazon Web Services. It decouples microservices and distributed systems and enables large-scale notifications.
