Table of Content
1. How does Amazon CloudWatch work?
2. Amazon CloudWatch features
3. Service for AWS CloudWatch Logging
4. Services for AWS CloudWatch Metrics
5. Advantages of Amazon CloudWatch
6. Cost of AWS CloudWatch
7. CloudTrail vs. AWS CloudWatch
8. Benefits of CloudWatch
9. Problems with AWS CloudWatch
10. CloudWatch use cases on AWS
One of the most popular services provided by Amazon is Amazon CloudWatch. It enables users to monitor the status of their AWS Architecture. You may learn more about CloudWatch in-depth in this blog post on Amazon CloudWatch. The AWS CloudWatch management tool from AWS offers a convenient method to keep an eye on AWS resources and applications that are hosted on AWS. This AWS CloudWatch lesson will teach you all there is to know about AWS CloudWatch, including its benefits. If you are interested in Digital Marketing or Graphic Designing and want to learn these interesting courses then click on the links mentioned Digital Marketing Course and Graphic Designing course
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How does Amazon CloudWatch work?
For the aim of sustaining the used services and resources, Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and management service offered by AWS. To make their lives easier, this is especially intended for developers, site reliability engineers, IT managers, and system operators.
However, how does it support AWS management and monitoring of our AWS services? It gathers and presents statistics, metrics, and insights on specific AWS services and your applications, allowing you to manage only the things you want to manage. For each AWS service and resource, the data collection takes the form of logs, metrics, and events. With the aid of CloudWatch, you can automate tasks, make debugging much simpler, and optimise your apps by getting rid of the cause of their increased latency.
Free for 10 custom metrics and Alarms on Amazon CloudWatch. For a lifetime, the first 10 custom metrics and 10 Alarms are free; any more usage will incur fees.
1,000,000 API queries, 5GB of log data ingestion and archiving, and the ability to create up to three dashboards each containing up to fifty metrics are all included in the free monthly offerings.
Let's continue with this AWS CloudWatch tutorial now that you are aware of what CloudWatch in AWS is and how it functions.
Amazon CloudWatch features
Two key services are provided by Amazon CloudWatch's features: logging and metrics. These 2 services are essentially a combination of CloudWatch.
Service for AWS CloudWatch Logging
Includes gathering, managing, and keeping track of service and application logs.
Services for AWS CloudWatch Metrics
The resource and operational metrics performance are among the metrics services provided by CloudWatch.
Let's now examine the combined functionality of CloudWatch's logging and metric services.
An interactive log query tool called CloudWatch Logs Insights aids in displaying and analysing log data. The log insights tool aids in filtering and aggregating log data, whether it be for publishing to the CloudWatch dashboard or making time-series graphs to illustrate the data.
Users can gather and store logs for numerous AWS services, such as AWS CloudTrail, AWS API Gateway, etc., as well as for particular applications and on-premises resources with the aid of the CloudWatch Logs feature.
CloudWatch Alarms - The CloudWatch Alarm continuously keeps track of the CloudWatch metrics. If the metric (or metric(s)) exceeds the predetermined/specified thresholds, an alert is raised. Additionally, the CloudWatch dashboard may show the status of the alarm.
Planning for resources and capacity is automated thanks to auto-scaling in AWS's CloudWatch.
AWS Integration - It is well known that CloudWatch makes it easier to integrate with AWS Identity and Access management. These integration capabilities grant a management console ownership over the ability to manage and restrict access to ClodWatch resources and data.
CloudWatch Events - It selects for AWS resource status changes and is in charge of producing a nearly real-time stream of events that are delivered to targets for processing. Eventually, with the aid of these events, the targets are informed of the state changes.
After learning more about AWS Cloudwatch, let's go on to learning about its typical procedure.
Normally, CloudWatch completes four tasks: it gathers log and metric data, monitors the applications, takes appropriate action, and ultimately analyses the information for future use.
When a service is mentioned in CloudWatch, the system begins gathering its raw log and metrics data. Even as the data is being collected, it continues to be monitored and updated. If any problems are discovered while AWS is monitoring, it will act and attempt to solve them. It will evaluate and create graphical material for better comprehension and future use using all the gathered log and metric data.
Alarms from Amazon CloudWatch
Only metric data is monitored by CloudWatch Alarms. By including a condition in the resource's metric data, you can configure alarms to trigger actions.
There are metrics for EC2 and SNS that are unique to CPU Utilization and Bytes Download.
Let's use an example to help us learn this. Consider that the EC2 instance's CPU use can reach 75%; once that threshold is crossed, an alarm should be triggered.
Three alarm states exist:
- Within Threshold, OK.
- ALARM - Threshold Crossed
- Metric not available/Missing data: INSUFFICIENT DATA (Good, Bad, Ignore, Missing).
Each millisecond that CloudWatch metric data is used, one of these states will be taken into account.
- The Alarm state is at OK when the CPU Utilization is 75% or below.
- You will be alerted if it surpasses and triggers an ALARM.
- It will be referred to as INSUFFICIENT DATA whenever there is no CPU Utilization data or inaccurate data is generated.
Advantages of Amazon CloudWatch
- Access all data from a single dashboard
- Due to their widespread distribution, web apps generate a lot of data, which can all be accessed through a single CloudWatch interface.
- A view of the entire infrastructure
- You can compare and contrast data generated by various services because you have access to all the AWS resources and services you utilise.
- lowering the total cost of ownership
- When the stated limitations are violated, CloudWatch can be used to set high-resolution alarms and can execute automatic actions. This can reduce the price of using AWS services.
- Observations from logs
- On various AWS services as well as the apps you operate on the infrastructure, you get thorough insights. Monitoring data like as memory, CPU, and capacity consumption allows for the extraction of insights.
- Optimize Resources and programmes
- You may tune your AWS services to deliver the highest throughput and performance using the log and metric data.
Cost of AWS CloudWatch
There are two tiers of pricing for AWS CloudWatch: a free tier and a paid tier. There are no commitment or up-front costs in either situation. Services including monitoring metrics, dashboards, logs, alarms, events, contributor insights, and synthetics, among others, are available in the Free tier.
The billing date for the paid tier is the last day of each month, and the charges are based on the "Pay for what you use" concept. This bill's total will depend on how many metrics, APIs, and metric streams were used.
CloudTrail vs. AWS CloudWatch
As is evident from the names, CloudWatch tracks activity in the AWS environment while CloudTrail monitors data, resources, and applications on AWS. The scope of regulating and monitoring is the fundamental distinction between the two. Scaling the apps is made easier by CloudWatch, and finding out who changed your applications and when is made easier by CloudTrail. While CloudTrail keeps an eye on the activities taking place therein, CloudWatch checks the performance of the AWS apps, resources, etc.
Benefits of CloudWatch
As a result of the widespread use of AWS resources and apps, many organisations are benefiting greatly from CloudWatch. Following are a few advantages of adopting CloudWatch:
- Ease of real-time processing of CloudWatch log data and ease of streaming log data to Amazon Elasticsearch
- full use of the available resources
- Simple system integration using AWS EC2 instances
- Continuity and dependability
- simplicity of use
- effective AWS resource monitoring
- allows for the alerting of anomalies found using Amazon SNS
Problems with AWS CloudWatch
- The CloudWatch dashboard does not provide the construction of discrete count histograms.
- The RAM measurements from CloudWatch are not stored on EC2.
- Much more expensive than alternative log-monitoring and third-party tools
- One can only integrate AWS resources.
CloudWatch use cases on AWS
The monitoring and events capabilities of AWS CloudWatch are being efficiently used by businesses to manage the health of the AWS environment. Specifically, AWS CloudWatch is used for the following things:
- It is used to deploy apps and derive metrics.
- facilitates monitoring of infrastructure health, application performance, and resource consumption
- used as both a dashboard and a logging tool
- Additionally used to organise the metrics for all AWS-deployed applications.