2.6.2. Amazon CloudWatch

💡 First Principle: Amazon CloudWatch provides a comprehensive and scalable monitoring service that collects operational data (metrics, logs, events) from AWS and on-premises resources, enabling real-time insights and automated actions.

Amazon CloudWatch is the primary monitoring and observability service for AWS. It provides data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, and optimize resource utilization.

Key Characteristics of Amazon CloudWatch:

• Metrics: Time-series data points that represent a measurement of a particular aspect of a resource or application. Automatically collected for most AWS services (e.g., EC2 CPU Utilization, RDS Database Connections). You can also publish custom metrics from your applications.
• Logs: Centralizes logs from various sources, such as Lambda functions, EC2 instances (via CloudWatch Agent), and custom applications. Allows for real-time monitoring and searching.
• Events: Represents a change in your AWS environment that indicates a change in a resource or condition. Captures events from AWS services and custom applications, enabling event-driven automation.
• Alarms: Monitors metrics and automatically triggers actions when a defined threshold is breached. Notifies users of critical issues (e.g., high CPU, low disk space).
• Dashboards: Customizable visualizations of metrics and alarms for operational oversight.

Scenario: A company needs to monitor the CPU utilization of its EC2 instances, collect application logs, and be alerted if the CPU usage exceeds a certain threshold.

Reflection Question: How does Amazon CloudWatch, by providing comprehensive data collection (metrics, logs) and automated alerting (alarms), enable businesses to gain real-time insights into their AWS environment and proactively respond to operational events?