Amazon CloudWatch enables extensive monitoring of applications and infrastructure, automating steps to decrease mean resolution time (MTTR).
Top developers provide tips for improving resource use and system efficiency. CloudWatch provides up to one second of visibility for metrics and logs, 15 months of data storage, and sophisticated capabilities like Container Insights for monitoring containerised applications.
It also provides historical cost optimisation and real-time system insights. CloudWatch's integration with AWS services and capabilities, such as anomaly detection, service lens, and internet monitoring, improves operational efficiency and troubleshooting.
According to Statista, Amazon's market share in the global cloud infrastructure industry was 31 per cent in the first quarter of 2024.
CloudWatch allows you to monitor the entire stack (applications and infrastructure, networks, and services) and to use logs and events to automate actions and reduce mean resolution time (MTTR).
It allows you to free up valuable resources and focus on developing applications and adding business value.
Top CloudWatch Developers provide actionable insights to help you manage resource usage, optimise application performance and understand system-wide operation health.
CloudWatch offers up to a second of visibility for metrics and logs, as well as 15 months of data storage options (metrics) and the ability to calculate metrics.
You can perform historical analyses for cost optimisation and gain real-time insight into the optimal use of applications and infrastructure.
CloudWatch Container insights can be used to monitor, troubleshoot and alert containerised applications and services.
CloudWatch aggregates and summarises compute usage information, such as CPU, memory, and disk data, as well as diagnostic information, such as container failures, to isolate and resolve issues quickly. Container Insights provides insights into container management services.
CloudWatch Vs. CloudTrail
CloudTrail and CloudWatch are two monitoring services that monitor AWS resources and apps. AWS CloudTrail, a web-based service, monitors activity in the AWS environment by tracking API calls.
CloudTrail is a log that tracks all user actions and changes in the Amazon Web Service System. It helps users monitor the trail of activities, thus the name. AWS CloudTrail gives information about who, what, when, and where of all activity within the AWS account.
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CloudWatch: Benefits
CloudWatch provides several benefits to organisations that use AWS applications and resources. CloudWatch offers several benefits, including the ability to provide information and its intuitive interface:
- Offers ease of use in basic functions.
- All AWS Monitoring Data is available on one platform.
- Effectively collects metrics for AWS environments.
- Increases and optimises the operational performance of AWS resources and on-premises resources.
- Provides insights into system performance through correlations, relationships, and other factors.
- Stability and reliability are provided.
- Offers integration with AWS resources.
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Amazon CloudWatch Use Cases
CloudWatch can collect data with a single view for monitoring and operational purposes. It can also deploy automated responses when monitored metrics reach a threshold.
CloudWatch can be used to perform the following tasks:
- Log analytics can be used to optimise performance and fix operational issues.
- Monitor AWS applications on-premises or in the cloud.
- Monitor and troubleshoot AWS infrastructure.
- Optimize system resources
Terms Related To Amazon Cloudwatch
Metrics:
- This is a set of time-ordered data points published on Amazon CloudWatch.
- Each data point has a timestamp.
- Data points represent the change in the value of a variable over time.
- The name, the namespace, and zero or more dimension(s) are unique.
- Cloudwatch uses metric math to query multiple metrics. Math expressions are used to create new time series based on the metrics.
Dimensions:
- A dimension is a unique name/value pair that identifies the metric.
- Dimensions are unique identifiers of a metric. When you add a name/value combination to a metric, you create a variation of that metric.
Statistics:
- Statistic data is metric data aggregated over specified periods.
- Cloudwatch offers only a few statistics: maximum, minimum sum, average and sample count.
Alarm:
- This is used to automate actions on our behalf.
- It monitors a single metric for a specific period and performs one or more actions specified based on its value.
- You can monitor the estimated AWS charges using an alarm.
Percentiles:
- It is the relative weighting of data within a dataset.
- It allows the user to better understand the distribution of metrics.
Cloudwatch Dashboard:
- Cloudwatch is a console that is easy to use and allows you to monitor all resources from a single location.
- Cloudwatch Dashboards can be created in any number.
- These dashboards are global and not specific to any particular region.
Cloudwatch Agent:
- Installing the device is mandatory.
- It gathers logs and system metrics from EC2 instances as well as on-premises servers.
Cloudwatch Event:
- Cloudwatch events allow you to create rules that are matched with any event (i.e., stopping an EC2 instance).
- The events can be sent to multiple targets, such as AWS Lambda Functions, Amazon SNS Topics, or Amazon SQS Queues.
- Cloudwatch Events continuously monitors operational events and takes action whenever the event changes by sending notifications, activating Lambda, etc.
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An event signifies a change to the AWS environment.
Events are generated whenever there is a state change in AWS resources.
- Rules are used to match events and routes to targets.
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Process events target.
These include Amazon EC2 instance, AWS Lambda function, etc.
The events are sent to a target in JSON format.
Cloudwatch Logs:
- Amazon Cloudwatch logs allow you to monitor and store files from AWS resources such as Amazon EC2 instances or Route53.
- You can also use it to troubleshoot system errors and store the logs on a highly durable medium.
- This also creates a log of the DNS queries received by Route 53.
Also Read: When And How To Search With Amazon CloudWatch Logs
Features Of Amazon CloudWatch
Collect
Logs Can Be Easily Collected And Stored
Amazon CloudWatch Logs allows you to store and collect logs in near-real time from your applications, resources, and services.
Logs can be divided into three categories:
1) Vendor logs AWS natively publishes these logs on your behalf. Amazon VPC flow logs and Amazon Route 53 are currently the only types supported.
2) Logs from AWS services. CloudWatch currently hosts logs from more than 30 AWS Services. These include Amazon API Gateway (API Gateway), AWS Lambda (AWS Lambda), AWS CloudTrail, and others.
3) Custom logs This is a log from your application or on-premises resource.
Measure Infrastructure And Application Metrics
Amazon CloudWatch with CloudWatch Developers lets you collect infrastructure metrics for more than 70 AWS Services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Simple Storage Service.
You can also collect metrics from AWS Lambda services, AWS Lambda, AWS Lambda, and Amazon API Gateway without any action on your end.
Built-in metrics can be used for API Gateway metrics to detect latency or for AWS Lambda metrics to detect errors and throttles.
Amazon CloudWatch allows you to collect metrics from your applications (such as error metrics, user activity, or memory usage) to monitor performance, troubleshoot problems, and spot trends.
Container Metrics And Logs Can Be Aggregated And Collected
Container Insights makes it easy to collect and aggregate curated metrics, as well as container ecosystem logs.
It automatically creates custom metrics for monitoring and alarming. It collects compute metrics like CPU, memory, and network information from each container. CloudWatch logs are ingested with metadata to facilitate monitoring and troubleshooting.
Metadata includes the Amazon EC2 instance, service, and Amazon Elastic Block Store volume mount and ID.
Container Insights can also collect logs from Amazon EC2 instances, custom logs, and logs for Amazon EKS/k8s control planes or data plans.
A pre-configured Agent can be used for Amazon EKS clusters and k8s clusters to collect logs. To collect logs for Amazon ECS applications, either the Amazon CloudWatch Logs driver or Fluent Bit may be used.
Lambda Logs And Metrics Can Be Aggregated
CloudWatch Lambda Insights makes it easy to collect and aggregate curated metrics from AWS Lambda Functions.
It gathers your compute performance metrics, such as CPU, network, memory, and memory from each Lambda function as performance events while automatically generating customised metrics for monitoring and alerting.
CloudWatch logs are used to streamline monitoring and troubleshooting. CloudWatch custom metrics can be automatically extracted from the ingested logs.
They can then be analysed further using CloudWatch Logs Insights' advanced query language. For more information, see the Lambda Insights Getting Started documentation.
Stream Metrics
You can produce near-real-time metrics streams that are sent to any location of your choice with Amazon CloudWatch Metrics Streams.
It is now easier to send CloudWatch data to popular third-party services using the Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose HTTP Endpoint. Create a continuous stream of CloudWatch metrics to power dashboards and alarms. Direct your metrics directly to your AWS data lake (such as Amazon S3), and begin analysing usage with tools like Amazon Athena.
Monitor
Cross-Account Observability Across Multiple AWS Accounts
CloudWatch's cross-account observability helps you monitor and troubleshoot multiple accounts in a single Region.
From a single view, you can search across multiple accounts for log groups. You can also run Logs Insights cross-account queries and create Contributor insights rules to identify the top-N log contributors.
You can also create alarms to evaluate metrics in other accounts and be alerted of anomalies or trending issues.
CloudWatch's cross-account visibility allows you to view an interactive map for your cross-account apps using ServiceLens.
You can drill down in one step into relevant metrics, logs, and traces. CloudWatch's cross-account capability provides a holistic view of your application owners and infrastructure in just a few simple steps without the need for additional data pipelines.
This saves you time and money by reducing management costs and effort.
Dashboards For A Unified Operational View
Amazon CloudWatch dashboards allow you to create reusable charts and visualise cloud platforms' resources and applications from a single view.
You can display metrics and logs in one dashboard, allowing you to get the full context of the issue and quickly move from diagnosing it to understanding its root cause.
You can compare key metrics such as CPU usage and memory to their capacity. You can correlate log patterns of particular metrics and set alarms that alert you to operational and performance issues.
You can gain a system-wide view of operational health and quickly troubleshoot problems to reduce MTTR.
Composite Alarms
Amazon CloudWatch composite alerts allow you to combine multiple alarms to reduce the noise of alarms. You will only receive one alarm notification if an issue affects multiple resources within an application.
You can then focus on the root causes of issues to minimise application downtime. You can specify the overall state of a grouping, such as an AWS Region or an Availability Zone.
High-Resolution Alarms
Amazon CloudWatch alarms let you set a threshold for metrics and then trigger an action. You can set high-resolution alerts, specify a percentile statistic and choose to either take action or ignore it.
You can, for example, create alarms based on Amazon EC2 metrics. Set notifications and perform one or more actions to detect and shut off instances that are not being used.
You can minimise potential business impact and downtime by using real-time alarming for metrics and events.
Logs And Metrics Correlation
Logs and metrics are generated by applications and infrastructure resources that generate large volumes of monitoring and operational data.
Amazon CloudWatch makes it simple to combine these datasets, in addition to providing access to and visualising them on a single platform. You can quickly go from diagnosing a problem to understanding its root cause. You can, for example, correlate a log pattern, such as an error, with specific metrics and set alarms that alert you to performance or operational issues.
Application Insights
To give you visibility into the health of your enterprise apps, Dedicated CloudWatch Developers with Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights streamline the configuration of observability.
It allows you to identify and configure key metrics and logs for your application resources, including databases, web and application servers (IIS), operating systems, load balancers, and queues.
It continuously monitors telemetry data to detect anomalies and errors and notify you of any issues with your application.
It creates dashboards with correlated metrics anomalies and logs errors to aid in troubleshooting. Additional insights are also provided to help you pinpoint the root cause.
You can take immediate remedial action to ensure your applications remain healthy and that end users aren't impacted.
Container Monitoring Insights
Container Insights automatically creates dashboards for the CloudWatch console. Dashboards are available for Amazon EKS, k8s, and nodes/EC2 instances and namespaces.
Each dashboard summarizes the running pods/tasks/containers by CPU and Memory for the selected window. You can dig deeper into AWS XRay traces and performance events based on the time window, pod/task/container selected to contextualise them.
Internet Monitor
You can see how internet problems affect the speed and accessibility of your AWS-hosted apps to your end customers thanks to Internet Monitor.
This reduces the time required to diagnose issues from days to just minutes. You can examine measurements at different timeframes, as well as different geographical granularities. This allows you to quickly visualise issues and take actions to improve the end-user experience.
AWS will notify you via the AWS Health Dashboard if the issue is due to the AWS network. The notification will tell you what steps AWS has taken to resolve the issue.
Internet Monitor sends measurements to CloudWatch Logs and CloudWatch Metrics to support the integration of health information specific to your application.
Internet Monitor can also send health events to Amazon EventBridge so that you can create notifications. Internet Monitor monitors the application via Amazon Virtual Private Clouds, Amazon CloudFront distributions, and Amazon WorkSpaces directories.
Lambda Monitoring Insights
Lambda Insights automatically creates dashboards for the CloudWatch console. These dashboards summarise compute performance and errors.
Anomaly Detection
Amazon CloudWatch Anomaly Detection uses machine-learning algorithms to analyse metric data continuously and identify anomalous behaviours.
The time of day, the day of the week, the season, or shifting trends are examples of natural patterns in measurements that can be used to build alarms with thresholds that automatically adjust.
Dashboards can be used to visualise metrics using anomaly detection bands. You can monitor, isolate and troubleshoot any unexpected changes to your metrics.
ServiceLens
The performance, availability, and general health of each of your apps can be examined and visualised using Amazon CloudWatch ServiceLens from a single location.
A complete picture of apps and their dependencies is provided by combining CloudWatch metrics, logs, and traces from AWS X-Ray. You can quickly identify performance bottlenecks and isolate the root cause of application problems.
Then, you can determine their impact on your users. You may monitor your application's three different aspects with CloudWatch ServiceLens: end-user tracking, transaction monitoring, and infrastructure monitoring.
CloudWatch ServiceLens offers a Service Map which visualises all of your resources contextually. It also provides an intuitive interface to allow you to dive into the correlated monitoring data.
Synthetics
Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics makes it easier to monitor the endpoints of your applications. It tests your endpoints 24 hours a day and notifies you if the behaviour isn't as expected.
These tests can also be tailored to test for latency, availability, transactions, broken links, task completions step-by-step, page loading errors, and load times for UI assets or checkout flows. CloudWatch Synthetics can be used to map alarming application endpoints back to infrastructure issues to reduce the MTTR.
CloudWatch can now collect canary traffic to continuously verify your customer experience, even when no customers are using your applications.
This allows you to detect issues before they do. CloudWatch Synthetics monitors your REST APIs and URLs as well as website content. It checks for unauthorised changes such as phishing attacks, code injection, and cross-site scripting.
RUM
Amazon CloudWatch RUM provides you with visibility into the client-side performance of your applications and reduces MTTR.
You can collect data in real-time on the performance of web applications. CloudWatch RUM provides you with more insight into the end-user experience.
You can use debugging information (such as error messages, user sessions, stack traces, and error messages) to visualize performance anomalies and fix performance issues.
You can get a better understanding of the impact of end users on your application, such as the number of users, browsers, and geolocations.
CloudWatch RUM collects data about your users' experience with your application. This can help you decide which features to launch or which bug fixes to prioritise.
Act Now
Auto Scaling
Auto Scaling automates capacity and resource planning. You can create a threshold alarm for a key metric to trigger an Auto Scaling automated action.
You could, for example, set up an Auto Scaling workflow to add or remove instances of EC2 based on CPU usage metrics and optimise cloud costs.
CloudWatch Events Automates The Response To Operational Changes
CloudWatch Events is a stream of events in near-real time that describes changes to AWS resources. You can respond quickly to changes in operations and take corrective actions.
You write simple rules that indicate which events matter to your application, and then you specify what actions should be taken when the rule matches an event.
You can set up a rule that will invoke AWS Lambda Functions or alert an Amazon Simple Notification Service topic (Amazon SNS).
Automate And Alarm Actions On EKS Clusters, ECS Clusters, and K8s Clusters
You can establish alarms on compute metrics that cause auto-scaling policies in your Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Group using Container Insights for Amazon EKS or k8s clusters.
It also gives you the option to stop, terminate and reboot any Amazon EC2 instances. You can use compute metrics for Service Auto Scaling on Amazon ECS clusters.
Analyze
Granular Data And Extended Storage
You can perform historical analyses to optimise resource usage. CloudWatch allows you to collect health metrics at up to one-second intervals, as well as custom metrics (such as those that come from your on-premises applications).
Real-time granular data enables enhanced visualisation as well as the detection and monitoring of patterns that can improve application performance.
Custom Operations On Metrics
Amazon CloudWatch Metrics Math allows you to calculate multiple metrics in real-time for analysis. This will help you better understand your infrastructure's operational health.
These computed metrics can be visualised in the AWS Management Console, added to CloudWatch dashboards, or retrieved using the GetMetricData action of the API. Metric Math includes arithmetic operators (such as +, - /, and *), as well as mathematical functions (such as Sum, Average Min, Max, and Standard Deviation).
Log Analytics
You can extract useful information from your logs with the help of Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights, helping you to tackle operational problems without having to manage or set up servers.
Instantly, you can start writing queries using aggregations and filters. Additionally, you can drill into specific log events, visualise time series data, and export results from queries as CloudWatch Dashboards.
You can now have complete visibility into your operations. Logs Insights can be used to query CloudWatch logs with just a few clicks from the AWS Management console.
You are charged solely for the queries that you run.
Analyze Container Metrics And Logs
Container Insights allows for the easy analysis of observable metrics, logs, and traces. This is done by simplifying deep links from automatic dashboards to granular events, custom logs, Amazon EC2 instance, Amazon EKS/k8s logs, or Amazon EKS control plan logs.
Lambda Metrics And Logs Can Be Analyzed To Determine Their Value
CloudWatch Logs Insights' advanced query language simplifies deep linking between automatic dashboards and granular performance logs, and application logs.
Contributor Insights
Amazon CloudWatch includes Contributor insights, which analyse time-series information to give a view of top contributors that influence system performance.
After being set up, the Contributor Insights run continuously without any additional user interaction. During an operational event, it enables developers and operators to more quickly isolate, identify, and fix issues.
Contributor insights help you identify what or who is affecting your system or application performance. For example, a particular resource, a customer account, or an API call.
You can use this to identify outliers, determine the heaviest traffic patterns and rank the most popular system processes. This includes logs from AWS CloudTrail and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Amazon API Gateway, as well as custom logs.
Contributor insights evaluate log events in near-real time and display reports that display the top contributors as well as the number of unique contributors within a dataset.
A contributor is a metric that aggregates dimensions in CloudWatch Logs. For example, account-id and interface-id are log fields for VPC Flow Logs. You can sort or filter contributor data using your criteria.
Data from the Contributor Insights reports can be added to CloudWatch alarms, displayed on CloudWatch dashboards, and graphed with CloudWatch metrics.
Metrics Insights
Amazon CloudWatch Insights Metrics is a flexible and fast SQL-based query tool that allows you to quickly identify patterns in millions of operational metrics.
With Metrics insights, you can gain better visibility into your underlying infrastructure performance and the performance of large-scale applications.
Flexible querying and on-the-fly metric aggregations are available. You can create powerful visualizations using Metrics insights queries. This will help you to proactively monitor issues, pinpoint them quickly and reduce the MTTR.
Evidently
Amazon CloudWatch allows application developers to conduct experiments and identify the unintended effects of new features before releasing them for general use.
This reduces the risk associated with new feature releases. Lets you test new features on the entire application stack, which allows for a safer launch.
You can launch new features and expose them to small groups of users, track key metrics like page load time or conversions, and then increase traffic.
Allows you to test different designs, gather user data and then release the most efficient design into production.
Compliance And Security
Amazon CloudWatch integrates with Access Management and AWS Identity. This allows you to control who can access your data and in what way.
AWS Key Management Service encryption can be used to encrypt log groups. This will increase compliance and cloud security with security tools.
Top CloudWatch Developers using Amazon CloudWatch Log Data Protection allows you to create data protection policies that can protect and discover sensitive data that is logged by applications and systems.
This feature uses ML and pattern-matching to automatically identify and mask sensitive information from your logs based on a policy you define.
Data protection helps you to streamline your architecture by offloading the data protection logic out of your applications.
It also supports your compliance goals. Data protection policies can be defined as scanning logs when they are ingested in order to determine the amount of sensitive data contained and to mask sensitive data detected.
Data that has been masked can be unmasked by security engineers using elevated privileges in IAM.
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CloudWatch: Challenges And Opportunities
The following are some of the issues that may arise when using AWS CloudWatch:
- Costs more than third-party monitoring tools and logs.
- Many standard AWS metrics are not visible in intervals smaller than one minute.
- Advanced integration is mainly limited to AWS resources.
- CloudWatch's advanced features can be difficult to learn.
Amazon CloudWatch Pricing
CloudWatch comes in two tiers: free and paid. Dashboards, alarms, log data, event contributor insights, canary runs, and dashboards are all included in the free tier, which delivers a restricted number of monitoring metrics.
The paid tier is also billed every month and follows the same pay-as-you-go pricing model as other cloud services. The pricing is determined by the number of APIs, metrics, and streams.
Conclusion
Because of its easy integration with AWS services, adaptability, and quick scaling capabilities, CloudWatch enjoys popularity among users.
It helps organisations comprehend how changes impact the overall operation of their environment and examines the primary reason for service interruptions, enabling them to decide how to address upcoming problems.
Paul is a highly skilled Full Stack Developer with a solid educational background that includes a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and a Master's degree in Software Engineering, as well as a decade of hands-on experience. Certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect, and Agile Scrum Master bolster his knowledge. Paul's excellent contributions to the software development industry have garnered him a slew of prizes and accolades, cementing his status as a top-tier professional. Aside from coding, he finds relief in her interests, which include hiking through beautiful landscapes, finding creative outlets through painting, and giving back to the community by participating in local tech education programmer.
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