What is Amazon CloudWatch?
Amazon CloudWatch is the central monitoring and observability platform from AWS. The service collects metrics, logs, and events from your entire AWS infrastructure and applications. CloudWatch provides real-time insights into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health.
Key Features
- Automatic metrics for over 80 AWS services
- CloudWatch Logs for centralized log aggregation
- Log Insights for SQL-like log analysis
- CloudWatch Alarms with SNS integration
- Container Insights for ECS, EKS, and Kubernetes
Common Use Cases
Infrastructure Monitoring: CloudWatch automatically monitors EC2 instances, RDS databases, Lambda functions, and all AWS services. Metrics like CPU, memory, network are immediately available.
Auto-Scaling: CloudWatch alarms trigger auto-scaling actions based on CPU, memory, or custom metrics. Scale resources automatically during load spikes.
Log Analysis: CloudWatch Logs aggregates logs from all sources. Log Insights enables real-time queries across millions of log entries in seconds.
Benefits
- Native integration with all AWS services
- Unified platform for metrics, logs, and traces
- Automatic anomaly detection with machine learning
- 15 months metric retention at no additional cost
Integration with innFactory
As an AWS Reseller, innFactory supports you with Amazon CloudWatch: monitoring architecture, custom metrics and dashboards, alarming strategies, and cost optimization.
Typical Use Cases
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Amazon CloudWatch cost?
Basic monitoring (5-minute metrics) for AWS services is free. Custom metrics cost $0.30 per metric/month, logs $0.50 per GB ingestion. Detailed monitoring for EC2 costs extra.
How long are metrics stored?
Standard metrics (5 minutes) are stored for 15 months. High-resolution metrics (1 second) are stored for 3 hours at full resolution, then aggregated.
What is the difference to X-Ray?
CloudWatch collects metrics and logs. X-Ray provides distributed tracing for microservices with detailed request traces through the entire application. Both services complement each other.
Can CloudWatch monitor on-premises?
Yes, the CloudWatch Agent collects metrics and logs from on-premises servers (Linux, Windows) and sends them via HTTPS to the CloudWatch API.