Blog > Introduction to Amazon CloudWatch Service
Companies are increasingly going digital, and modern applications utilizing microservices and service architectures to scale, serve a global customer base, and gain release velocity. In this world of business, application success means better results. However, monitoring distributed applications and resources is challenging because of their complex data overload and the fact that monitoring tools were built to oversee system and application performance and physical silos to gain observability. A shift from looking for failures defining answers is the key solution is Amazon CloudWatch.
Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch service is a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications to run on AWS. It is built for development, system operation, website reliability engineers or SRE, and IT managers. Amazon CloudWatch is the Amazon Web Services component that provides real-time monitoring of AWS resources and customer applications running on Amazon infrastructure. AWS Cloud watch enables monitoring for EC2 and other Amazon cloud services. It provides alerts when things go wrong. Users can use Amazon CloudWatch to collect and track metrics to get system-wide visibility into resource utilization application performance and overall operational health.
The user can use the insights to react and keep the application running smoothly. It is also providing data and actionable insights to monitor the application, analyze and respond to system-performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health. CloudWatch collects data in the form of logs, metrics, and events. It is providing a unified view of AWS resources applications, services, and on-premise servers.
What Does Amazon CloudWatch Do?
- Collects and track key metrics
- Collects, monitors, and stores log files
- Create alarms and sends notifications
- Users can send system events from AWS resources to AWS lambda, SNS, etc.
Resources Monitored by CloudWatch
Some resources monitored by AWS CloudWatch are as follows:
- Virtual Instances (EC2)
- Databases (AWS RDS)
- Data Stored in Amazon S3
- Elastic Load Balancers
- Other AWS Resources
CloudWatch Monitoring
Amazon CloudWatch offers two types of monitoring, such as:
Basic Monitoring
CloudWatch basic monitoring included free of charge and polls every five minutes and gives ten metrics, five gigabytes of data ingestion, and five gigabytes of data storage.
Detailed Monitoring
CloudWatch detailed monitoring is chargeable. Its price is per month, but it pulls every minute, so if the user wants more detailed monitoring, they can pay for it.
Metrics
AWS CloudWatch allows recording metrics for services such as EBS, EC2, Elastic load balancer, and Amazon S3. These matrices provide visual and text-based notifications. Metrics are hypervisor level so that the user can get things like CPU disk network.
Events
Amazon CloudWatch monitoring allows creating events based, for example, trigger Lambda functions.
Logs
Users can install agents on EC2 instances to send monitoring data about the instance to CloudWatch. With this, the user can monitor things like HTTP response codes in Apache, or the user can count exceptions in application logs.
Alarms
It allows set alarms to warn based on resource usage; for example, if CPU utilization is too high, it can also send notifications. It can help auto scale, so if the CPU is maxed out user can get another instance launched to take care of some of the load, or the user can send cloud watch monitoring alarms to EC2 actions to recover or reboot an instance. It also allows using alarms to shut down the instance. When instances are idle, then cloud watch allows to shut them down.
CloudWatch enables automated actions to troubleshoot issues and discover insights to optimize applications, and they are running smoothly. With Amazon CloudWatch it is easy to get started there is no upfront commitments or minimum fee user pay for what they use. It is a smart way to monitor a business flexibly at a low cost.
If you have any questions about AWS Cloudwatch, feel free to contact Silicon Valley Cloud IT professionals for a free consultation.
Author: SVCIT Editorial
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