As the cloud continues to gain momentum, companies are building tools to make managing applications easier. Amazon’s CloudWatch is an open software platform that allows developers to monitor the performance of their applications and to create custom dashboards for analyzing application data.
AWS CloudWatch allows you to monitor your AWS infrastructure and the applications you run on AWS in real-time. It works by tracking and monitoring metrics. Think of metrics as variables that are tied to your resources.
What is amazon cloudwatch
Amazon CloudWatch is a web service that enables you to monitor and manage various metrics and configure alarm actions based on data from those metrics.
CloudWatch uses metrics to represent the data points for your resources. AWS services send metrics to CloudWatch. CloudWatch then uses these metrics to create graphs automatically that show how performance has changed over time.
CloudWatch dashboard
Amazon CloudWatch dashboards are customizable home pages in the CloudWatch console that you can use to monitor your resources in a single view, even those resources that are spread across different Regions. You can use CloudWatch dashboards to create customized views of the metrics and alarms for your AWS resources.
CloudWatch Alarms
The Amazon CloudWatch alarm service is an easy way for you to get alerted of events that you care about. You can use it to create alarms for many of your most important AWS processes. For example, you can create an alarm for your SQS queues that triggers every minute to check if any of your messages are overdue. You can create an alarm for your EC2 instances that makes sure they are always running. You can create alarms for your S3 buckets that make sure they are not under-occupied. You can create alarms for your AWS Lambda functions to make sure they are not over-used.
For example, suppose that your company’s developers use Amazon EC2 instances for application development or testing purposes. If the developers occasionally forget to stop the instances, the instances will continue to run and incur charges.
In this scenario, you could create a CloudWatch alarm that automatically stops an Amazon EC2 instance when the CPU utilization percentage has remained below a certain threshold for a specified period. When configuring the alarm, you can specify to receive a notification whenever this alarm is triggered.
Accessing CloudWatch
You can access CloudWatch using any of the following methods:
- Amazon CloudWatch console – https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/
- AWS CLI – For more information, see Getting Set Up with the AWS Command Line Interface in the AWS Command Line Interface User Guide.
- CloudWatch API – For more information, see the Amazon CloudWatch API Reference.
- AWS SDKs – For more information, see Tools for Amazon Web Services.
