What is Amazon CloudWatch?
Amazon CloudWatch is the central monitoring and observability platform for AWS. The service collects metrics, logs, and events from your entire AWS infrastructure, from applications, and from on-premises systems. CloudWatch provides insight into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health, and forms the basis for alarms, dashboards, and auto-scaling in AWS.
Core Features
- Automatic metrics for numerous AWS services with no additional configuration
- CloudWatch Logs for centralized log aggregation from AWS services, applications, and on-premises sources
- Logs Insights for interactive, SQL-like log analysis
- CloudWatch Alarms with integration into Amazon SNS and Auto Scaling
- Container Insights for ECS, EKS, and Kubernetes
- CloudWatch Application Signals for service-level objectives and interplay with AWS X-Ray
- Machine-learning-based anomaly detection for metrics
Typical Use Cases
Infrastructure Monitoring: CloudWatch automatically monitors EC2 instances, RDS databases, Lambda functions, and most AWS services. Metrics such as CPU utilization, memory, and network traffic are available without additional setup.
Auto-Scaling: CloudWatch alarms trigger auto-scaling actions based on CPU, memory, or custom metrics, allowing resources to scale automatically with load.
Log Analysis: CloudWatch Logs aggregates logs from a wide range of sources. Logs Insights enables queries across large volumes of log entries in a short time.
Benefits
- Native integration with virtually all AWS services
- Unified platform for metrics, logs, and (via X-Ray) traces
- Automatic anomaly detection based on machine learning
- Long-term metric history without needing separate data storage
Integration with innFactory
As an AWS Reseller, innFactory supports you in building a monitoring architecture with Amazon CloudWatch: from custom metrics and dashboards to alarming strategies and cost optimization for your observability landscape.
Typical Use Cases
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Amazon CloudWatch?
Amazon CloudWatch is the central monitoring and observability platform for AWS. It collects metrics, logs, and events from AWS services, applications, and on-premises systems, and makes them actionable through dashboards, alarms, and log analytics.
What does Amazon CloudWatch cost?
CloudWatch follows a pay-per-use model with no base fee. Basic metrics for many AWS services are free, while custom metrics, log ingestion, log storage, additional dashboards, and API calls are billed based on usage. Details are available on the official pricing page.
How long are metrics stored?
Metric data is retained for up to 15 months, with resolution decreasing over time: high-resolution metrics (under 60 seconds) are kept at full resolution for only a few hours before being automatically aggregated into coarser intervals.
What is the difference to X-Ray?
CloudWatch collects metrics, logs, and events for infrastructure and applications. AWS X-Ray provides distributed tracing for microservices with detailed request traces across an entire application. The two services complement each other and are tightly integrated through CloudWatch Application Signals.
Can CloudWatch monitor on-premises systems?
Yes, the CloudWatch Agent can be installed on on-premises servers (Linux, Windows) and sends metrics and logs to the CloudWatch API over HTTPS.
Note: All product information on this page has been compiled with care, but is provided without guarantee and may be outdated or incomplete. Cloud services evolve rapidly — features, pricing, SLAs, and availability change frequently. Authoritative and up-to-date information can only be found on the official product page of AWS (official documentation). This page does not represent an offer by AWS.