What is CloudWatch? Features, Uses, And Advantages

Safalta Expert Published by: Aryan Rana Updated Wed, 21 Sep 2022 11:15 PM IST

Highlights

Amazon CloudWatch is an AWS monitoring and management service created with the goal of keeping up with the resources and services that are being used. This is specifically made to make the lives of developers, site reliability engineers, IT managers, and system operators easier.

Free Demo Classes

Register here for Free Demo Classes

Please fill the name
Please enter only 10 digit mobile number
Please select course
Please fill the email
Something went wrong!
Download App & Start Learning

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.

Source: Safalta.com

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

Download these FREE Ebooks:
1. Introduction to Digital Marketing
2. Website Planning and Creation

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.
 





 

What sort of operations can I perform on CloudWatch logs?

With your current system, application, and custom log files, you can monitor and troubleshoot your systems and applications using CloudWatch Logs. You may monitor your logs using CloudWatch Logs in almost real-time for particular words, numbers, or patterns.

How long is resource data stored in Amazon CloudWatch?

The free extension of metric retention from 14 days to 15 months has been announced by CloudWatch. Customers may start analysing seasonality, monthly trends, and in the future, year-over-year comparisons and forecasts, instantly utilising the at least three months of historical metrics that CloudWatch has already saved.

How can I check the CloudWatch logs?

Click on the Logs option when the CloudWatch dashboard displays, then click on how many metric filters are displayed for your log group. (The original setting for the number of metric filters is zero.) You must first build a log group if there are no log groups already.

Free Demo Classes

Register here for Free Demo Classes

Trending Courses

Professional Certification Programme in Digital Marketing (Batch-6)
Professional Certification Programme in Digital Marketing (Batch-6)

Now at just ₹ 49999 ₹ 9999950% off

Master Certification in Digital Marketing  Programme (Batch-12)
Master Certification in Digital Marketing Programme (Batch-12)

Now at just ₹ 64999 ₹ 12500048% off

Advanced Certification in Digital Marketing Online Programme (Batch-23)
Advanced Certification in Digital Marketing Online Programme (Batch-23)

Now at just ₹ 24999 ₹ 3599931% off

Advance Graphic Designing Course (Batch-9) : 90 Hours of Learning
Advance Graphic Designing Course (Batch-9) : 90 Hours of Learning

Now at just ₹ 19999 ₹ 3599944% off

Flipkart Hot Selling Course in 2024
Flipkart Hot Selling Course in 2024

Now at just ₹ 10000 ₹ 3000067% off

Advanced Certification in Digital Marketing Classroom Programme (Batch-3)
Advanced Certification in Digital Marketing Classroom Programme (Batch-3)

Now at just ₹ 29999 ₹ 9999970% off

Basic Digital Marketing Course (Batch-24): 50 Hours Live+ Recorded Classes!
Basic Digital Marketing Course (Batch-24): 50 Hours Live+ Recorded Classes!

Now at just ₹ 1499 ₹ 999985% off

WhatsApp Business Marketing Course
WhatsApp Business Marketing Course

Now at just ₹ 599 ₹ 159963% off

Advance Excel Course
Advance Excel Course

Now at just ₹ 2499 ₹ 800069% off