AWS CloudWatch Platform

An AWS CloudWatch Platform is a IT system monitoring platform provided by AWS that offers monitoring and management for AWS cloud resources and applications.

• Context:
  • It can (typically) monitor AWS Cloud Resources like Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon DynamoDB tables, and Amazon RDS DB instances.
  • It can (often) collect and track metrics such as CPU utilization, memory usage, and disk I/O for resources deployed in AWS.
  • It can (typically) be integrated with AWS Auto-Scaling to dynamically manage resource allocation based on monitored metrics.
  • ...
  • It can range from monitoring a single EC2 instance to overseeing complex multi-region AWS environments.
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  • It can provide the capability to set CloudWatch Alarms, which trigger automated actions or notifications based on predefined conditions.
  • It can also collect and monitor log files using CloudWatch Logs, providing real-time insights into application behavior.
  • It can accept custom metrics submitted programmatically via the AWS CloudWatch API, enabling users to track specific application performance indicators.
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• Example(s):
  • an AWS CloudWatch Logs, 2014 instance used to monitor, store, and analyze log data from various AWS resources, enabling real-time insights into application performance and issues.
  • an AWS CloudWatch Alarms, 2009 setup that triggers automated actions like scaling Amazon EC2 instances or sending notifications based on predefined metric thresholds.
  • an AWS CloudWatch Contributor Insights, 2020 implementation that helps identify top contributors to high-cardinality data, optimizing operational efficiency.
  • an AWS CloudWatch Synthetics, 2020 use case that monitors API endpoints through synthetic tests, ensuring application reliability and performance.
  • an AWS CloudWatch Container Insights, 2020 instance that enhances monitoring and troubleshooting for containerized applications, providing deeper visibility into container performance metrics.
  • ...
• Counter-Example(s):
  • Google Cloud Monitoring, which offers similar monitoring and observability features as AWS CloudWatch but is part of the Google Cloud Platform, providing native integration with Google Cloud services rather than AWS services.
  • Splunk® Enterprise, a third-party log management and analytics platform that provides comprehensive monitoring and analytics capabilities but operates independently from AWS, with its own architecture for ingesting, indexing, and querying data.
  • AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Service, which focuses on managing access to AWS resources rather than monitoring and observability, serving a different function in the AWS ecosystem.
  • AWS Config, which is focused on assessing, auditing, and evaluating the configurations of your AWS resources rather than real-time monitoring.
  • Prometheus, an open-source monitoring solution that does not rely on AWS services but instead provides its own metrics collection and storage.
• See: Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, AWS Auto-Scaling

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References

2019

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Elastic_Compute_Cloud#Amazon_CloudWatch
  • Amazon CloudWatch is a web service that provides real-time monitoring to Amazon's EC2 customers on their resource utilization such as CPU, disk, network and replica lag for RDS Database replicas. CloudWatch does not provide any memory, disk space, or load average metrics without running additional software on the instance. Since December 2017 Amazon provides a CloudWatch Agent for Windows and Linux operating systems included disk and previously not available memory information, previously Amazon provided example scripts for Linux instances to collect OS information. The data is aggregated and provided through AWS management console. It can also be accessed through command line tools and Web API's, if the customer desires to monitor their EC2 resources through their enterprise monitoring software. Amazon provides an API which allows to operate on CloudWatch alarms.

    The metrics collected by Amazon CloudWatch enables the auto-scaling feature to dynamically add or remove EC2 instances.Template:Sfnp The customers are charged by the number of monitoring instances.

    Since May 2011, Amazon CloudWatch accepts custom metrics that can be submitted programmatically via Web Services API and then monitored the same way as all other internal metrics, including setting up the alarms for them, and since July 2014 Cloudwatch Logs service is also available.

2016

• https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/
  • QUOTE: Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications you run on AWS. You can use Amazon CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, set alarms, and automatically react to changes in your AWS resources. Amazon CloudWatch can monitor AWS resources such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon DynamoDB tables, and Amazon RDS DB instances, as well as custom metrics generated by your applications and services, and any log files your applications generate. You can use Amazon CloudWatch to gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health. You can use these insights to react and keep your application running smoothly.

Manage Your AWS Resources

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