CloudWatch is a monitoring facility for cloud resources in the solutions that run on Amazon Web Services. It can collect, analyze and review metrics, set and manage alarms, and automatically react to changes in your AWS resources. Cloudwatch can monitor and track AWS resources such as EC2 instances, DynamoDB tables, and RDS DB instances. It can also produce custom metrics created by applications and services and any log files applications generate. Amazon CloudWatch helps to gain system-wide visibility into resource consumption, application performance and operational tracking.
CloudWatch is AWS monitoring and management facility which is intended for the resolve of maintaining the services and resources which are used. Particularly, this is designed for developers, support engineers, Cloud architects, IT managers, and system operators to make their life easier.
CloudWatch helps to deal with the Amazon logs to monitor, review, track, store and access log files from Amazon EC2 instances. This can also be used to store your logs in Amazon S3 or Amazon Glacier, where you can reserve them indefinitely, or set up an aging policy to delete older logs that are no longer wanted. A CloudWatch Logs agent is also available that delivers an automatic way to send data to CloudWatch Logs.
AWS Monitoring
CloudWatch monitoring is always allowed by default for every EC2 instance at 5-min granularity. What you can allow is detailed monitoring which means you get 1-min reflection granularity and aggregate metrics. Default monitoring at 5-min level is free, but detailed monitoring costs money. CloudWatch enables robust monitoring of resources like:
• Virtual instances hosted in Amazon EC2
• Databases located in Amazon RDS
• Auto-Scaling Groups
• Data stored in Amazon S3
• Elastic Load Balancer
It helps to monitors, stores and provides access to system and application log files. Also delivers a catalog of regular reports that you can use to examine trends and monitor system performance. It also delivers various alert capabilities, including rules and triggers high resolutions alarms and directs notifications. It gathers and offers a real-time presentation of operational data in form of key metrics like CPU utilization, disk storage etc.
Real-time instant overview
CloudWatch has system-wide detailed visibility into your AWS resources and applications. It will analyze, review and monitor your resource files and generate key metrics based on application’s log files. Key metrics include CPU usage, CPU latency, Network traffic, Disk storage etc. Based on these metrics it delivers a real-time instant overview of system activity and individual resources.
CloudWatch also delivers a complete at-a-glance view of cloud infrastructure to keep track of application/solutions performances, spot trends and fix operational issues. CloudWatch arranges high-resolution alarms and sends real-time notifications in case of unexpected working changes in AWS environment.