What is Amazon CloudWatch 2025?

Enterprises migrating to cloud computing often need help monitoring their systems for security, operational efficiency, internal policies, and compliance.

How can they ensure that their services do not suffer? AWS CloudWatch is a cloud monitoring tool that can monitor services.

In the following article you can also find tips to hire top cloud watch developers.

What's CloudWatch?

For both cloud apps and AWS(amazon web services) services, AWS CloudWatch offers unified monitoring. It keeps track of operational metrics from resources, including EC2 instances, amazon RDS databases, VPCs, and Lambda functions, as well as log files from those resources.

AWS CloudWatch allows you to track your AWS account resources, produce a stream or trigger alarms, and take actions for specific conditions.

You have access to AWS resources thanks to AWS CloudWatch. You can monitor data like resource utilization, application performance, and operational health.

Using these insights, you can control your application and keep the system operating smoothly.

Two separate services that makeup AWS (amazon web services) CloudWatch are marketed together as "CloudWatch."

• Metrics services to measure and manage operational metrics and resource performance.

• Logging service that captures, stores, and contains service and application logs.

Data on resource metrics are collected and kept by the Metrics service. It also provides alarms, alarms, event filtering, and dashboards.

CloudWatch Events is the event service, and CloudWatch Alarms is the alarm service.

The logging service is called CloudWatch Logs. It offers log data archiving and cloud storage in addition to CloudWatch Logs, a simple log viewer and query tool.

Features Of Amazon CloudWatch

The Namespace is a Container that Stores CloudWatch Metrics:

• No default namespace exists.

• AWS namespaces are designated by the naming scheme AWS/ Service.

Metrics is a Time-Ordered Collection of Data Points that are Published on CloudWatch:

• It only exists in the area where they were created.

• If there is no new data for 15 months, they immediately expire and cannot be erased.

• As new data points are obtained, data older than 15 months is erased.

• A timestamp should be added to each metric data point.

  The timestamp can be two weeks in the past or two years in the future.

  The date the data point was received will be used by CloudWatch to construct a timestamp.

• Many services, by default, provide accessible metrics for their resources.

  You can publish your application metrics or enable detailed monitoring.

• Thanks to metric mathematics, you can query numerous CloudWatch metrics and then apply mathematical expressions to create new time series based on those data.

• Important Information for EC2 Metrics: CloudWatch does not automatically start collecting metrics for memory and disc space usage.

  You must first install CloudWatch Agent on your instances to retrieve these metrics.

Dimensions are a Name/Value Combination that Uniquely Identifies a Particular Metric:

• A metric can have up to 10 dimensions.

• You create a new version of a metric every time you add a size to one of the metrics.

• Resolution: A custom metric can either be categorized as high or standard.

• Standard Resolution:

  • Data with a granularity of up to one minute

  • AWS(amazon web service) services produce default metrics.

• High Resolution:

  • Data that is more precise than one second

  • This provides more information about your application's sub-minute activity.

Statistics-Metric Data Aggregations for Specified Periods:

• Each statistic is assigned a unit.

  Each statistic that specifies a team is aggregated in different ways.

• You can choose a unit when creating a custom measurement.

  If you do not specify a team, CloudWatch will use None.

• A period is a time connected to a specific CloudWatch statistic.

  The default value is 60 seconds.

• When you request statistics from CloudWatch, it aggregates data throughout your selected time frame.

• A pre-aggregated data set called a statistics set can be used to insert big datasets.

• Percentile: The relative position of a value within a dataset is indicated by percentiles.

  You may learn more about the distribution of your metric data by using percentiles.

• Alarms: Based on the metric's value with a time threshold, monitors a single measure for a predetermined amount of time and does one or more specified actions.

• An alarm can be set up to monitor load balancer latency and CPU usage.

  Instances and billing alarms can both be managed with it.

• When an alarm is in the ALARM condition, it appears red on a dashboard display.

• Only alarms can invoke actions that result in sustained state changes.

Alarm States:

• OK: The metric or expression falls within the specified threshold.

• ALARM: The metric or expression is not within the specified threshold.

• INSUFFICIENT_DATA: The Alarm has just started, the metric is not available, or more data needs to be available for the metric to determine the alarm state.

• Estimated AWS fees can be tracked with Amazon CloudWatch Alarms.

  CloudWatch can only measure estimated AWS costs and not actual usage.

  For reserved EC2 instances, you cannot specify coverage targets in CloudWatch.

  This is only possible in AWS Budgets and Cost Explorer.

Also Read: - What is EC2, EBS & Cloud Watch in 2024?

You can Specify Three Settings When You Create an Alarm:

• Period: It refers to the time taken to calculate the metric or expression to create an alarm.

  It is expressed in seconds.

• Evaluation Period: The evaluation Period refers to the number of data points or periods evaluated to determine the alarm state.

• Data Points for Alarm: This is the total amount of data points that have been compromised throughout the evaluation.

  The last data points corresponding to the alarm status must be within the limit. They do not have to follow one another.

  There must be an equal amount of data points between each breach.

Evaluation Period: CloudWatch can be used to treat missing data points in each Alarm as follows:

• The Alarm should consider cutting data points when adjusting the status (default).

• NotBreaching--missing data points are treated as being within the threshold.

• Missing points of data are considered to be violations.

• Ignore - The current alarm condition is preserved.

CloudWatch Dashboard:

• You can configure the home pages in the CloudWatch console to make it easier to monitor all of your resources, even those dispersed across various locations.

• CloudWatch dashboards can be created in unlimited numbers.

• All dashboards can be viewed globally and not by region.

• A graph can be edited, moved, edited, or removed by you.

  A chart can be metric manually.

You can Share Your Dashboards with Others Who don't have Direct Access to Your AWS Account in Three Different Ways:

• You can share a single dashboard with specific passwords and email addresses for each person who can access it.

• A single dashboard can be publicly shared so anyone with the link can access it.

• CloudWatch dashboards can be shared in one account.

  To enable dashboard access, you can also specify a third-party SSO provider.

  All users that are part of the SSO provider group can access the dashboards.

  The SSO provider can be integrated with Amazon Cognito to do this.

CloudWatch Events:

• Stream system events that describe changes to AWS resources in close to real-time.

• Events respond to these operational changes by activating functions, sending messages in response, making changes, and capturing state data.

Concepts:

• Events: show that your AWS environment has changed.

• Targets: processes events.

• Rules: match incoming events to processing objectives and direct them there.

• Amazon EventBridge builds on the CloudWatch Events API.

  The infrastructure is shared by Amazon EventBridge and CloudWatch Events.

  CloudWatch Events can be used to manage your events, but it is better to use Amazon EventBridge.

• The powers and capacities of CloudWatch Events are increased by Amazon EventBridge.

  It makes it simpler for users to link apps by enabling them to integrate data from their apps and third-party SaaS applications.

CloudWatch Logs

• Log data for queries

• Real-time monitoring logs of EC2 instances

• CloudTrail log events can be monitored.

• Logs are automatically kept indefinitely by default and never expire.

• Archive log data.

• Route 53 DNS queries.

• CloudWatch Logs Analytics: You may use queries in CloudWatch Logs Analytics to interactively search for and examine log data.

• AWS services natively publish CloudWatch logs on the client's behalf.

  The first category of Vended logs to gain from this tiered paradigm will be VPC flow logs.

• You can search and filter that log data once the CloudWatch Logs agent starts publishing log data to Amazon CloudWatch by implementing one of the numerous metric filters.

  The phrases and patterns you want to look for in log data transmitted to CloudWatch Logs are specified by meta-metric filters.

• Data is not retroactively filtered by filters.

  Only release the metrics for actions after the filter is applied.

  If the timestamp is more recent than the metric creation date, filtered results will only return the top 50 lines.

Concepts of Metric Filter:

• Filter pattern - This is how you define what to search for in your log file.

• Metric name - The name of the CloudWatch metric that should receive the monitored log data.

• The metric namespace is the destination namespace for the new CloudWatch Metric.

• Metric value - the metric's published value in numbers each time a matching log is discovered.

• When there are no matching logs, the value reported to the metric filter is considered the default value.

  To guarantee that data is reported for each period, this parameter is set to 0.

• Dimensions - pairs of keys and values that specify a measurement.

• Two subscription filters can be made using various filtering techniques for a single log group.

• CloudWatch Contributor Intelligences allows you to make rules for analyzing events in a structured log.

• CloudWatch Insights- You can collect and group indicators in real time to spot issues with CloudWatch Insights.

• CloudWatch Evidently- enables you to test new features before ultimately launching them by distributing them to segments of your user base and tracking how they perform.

• Actual user sessions can be used to track the performance of your online apps.

  CloudWatch makes this possible.

CloudWatch Agency:

• Both your on-premises servers and EC2 instances can be used to collect more logs and system-level information.

• Installation is required.

• The default namespace for metrics that are gathered is CWAgent.

• You can extract custom metrics from applications using StatsD and collect them.

Cloudwatch Metric Streams:

• You can produce a continuous, almost real-time stream of measurements to a chosen destination using Amazon CloudWatch Metric Streams.

• Sending metrics to Datadog (New Relic), Splunk (dynatrace), Sumo Logic, and S3 are all possible using Metric Streams.

Access Control and Authentication:

• To authenticate who has access to your account, you can use IAM roles or users.

• Access control management tools include dashboard permissions, IAM identity-based policies, and service-linked roles.

A Permissions Policy Defines Who has What Access:

• Policy-based on identity

• Resource-Based Policies

• To utilize IAM policies, if you lack any CloudWatch Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) when establishing a policy to limit access to CloudWatch operations, use a * (asterisk) instead.

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Operation Of CloudWatch

Let's see how CloudWatch functions and how do dedicated cloud watch developers creates it:

• Troubleshooting and monitoring Infrastructure issues: To find the source of performance issues in AWS resources, CloudWatch keeps an eye on AWS Fargate, Amazon EKS (Elastic Container Service), Kubernetes, and Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service).

• Strengthens the mean time to resolution: CloudWatch allows users to respond quickly to problems by analyzing logs and metrics.

  Additionally, they can be used in conjunction with AWS X-Ray trace data to provide end-to-end observability and decrease overall mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR).

• Make resource optimization possible: CloudWatch alarms monitor metric values and compare them to thresholds set by users or created by CloudWatch using machine-learning models (Artificial Intelligence)to detect abnormal behavior.

  An instance may be terminated, or Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling enabled as soon as an alarm is raised by AWS CloudWatch.

• Monitors the applications: CloudWatch monitors applications on different AWS platforms, such as Amazon EC2, containers, and serverless.

  At every level of the performance stack, data is gathered.

  This comprises the metrics and logs shown on automated dashboards.

• Analyzes log: CloudWatch analyzes, visualizes, and analyzes logs to identify operational issues and improve application performance.

  To quickly resolve operational issues, users can start querying. We now have a basic understanding of CloudWatch.

  Let's examine a few advantages of Amazon Cloud Watch, a well-liked cloud monitoring program.

Amazon CloudWatch - Advantages

AWS cloud resources and the apps you use on AWS are monitored by Amazon CloudWatch. As per reports, Amazon CloudWatch holds a 50.95% market share in the infrastructure monitoring industry. It has a number of advantages such as:

• All data accessible from one dashboard

• Web apps are distributed widely and generate lots of data.

  A single CloudWatch interface can be used to obtain all of this data.

• overall view of the infrastructure

• Accessing all AWS resources and services allows you to compare and contrast data from various providers quickly.

• The reduced total cost of ownership

• CloudWatch can be used when the limitations have been violated to set alarms with high resolution and execute automated actions.

  This will reduce the cost of AWS services.

• Log observations.

• You can get detailed insights on several AWS code pipeline services and the apps you use to access the infrastructure.

  You can extract insights by monitoring CPU, memory, and capacity consumption.

• Improve programs and resources.

• You can tune your AWS code deploy services using log and metric data to get the optimal throughput and performance.

• CloudWatch's most important benefit is the ability to access all of your information from one platform.

  This helps break down silos (servers, networks, databases, etc.).

  CloudWatch allows you to quickly and easily gain system-wide visibility.

• AWS CloudWatch offers real-time insight to help you optimize operational expenses, AWS applications, and resources.

• CloudWatch makes it easy to analyze, visualize, and explore logs to resolve operational problems and maintain smooth applications.

• CloudWatch also offers your applications, AWS services, and infrastructure stack operational visibility.