Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch provides monitoring services for AWS resources.
Note that CloudWatch is different than CloudTrail. CloudTrail lets you create an audit trail of changes to your AWS environment. For example, you can log when you create a new user or a new role. CloudWatch is for performance monitoring of specific resources.
Metrics
Metrics are the fundamental concept in CloudWatch. A metric represents a time-ordered set of data points that are published to CloudWatch. AWS services send metrics to CloudWatch, and you can send your own custom metrics to CloudWatch.
Billing
Billing alarms may be created. You can choose to receive an email if your estimated AWS charges go beyond a certain threshold.
EC2
EC2 monitoring can be basic or detailed. Basic (or standard) monitoring creates metrics at a five-minute frequency. Detailed monitoring happens every minute.
Default metrics for EC2 instances:
- CPU utilization
- Disk usage (
DiskReadBytes,DiskReadOps,DiskWriteBytes,DiskWriteOps) - Data transfer (
NetworkIn,NetworkOut,NetworkPacketsIn,NetworkPacketsOut). - Status checks
Dashboard
CloudWatch Dashboards let you display metrics. Each Dashboard displays widgets. Each widget can be markdown text, a number, or a chart.
Alarms
CloudWatch Alarms notify you when a metric hits a particular threshold. An
alarm has three possible states: OK, ALARM, and INSUFFICIENT_DATA.
Events
CloudWatch Events help you respond to state changes in your AWS resources. For example, you could have an event that automatically triggers a Lambda to update your DNS when an EC2 instance comes online.
Logs
CloudWatch Logs help you aggregate, monitor, and store logs. These logs usually happen at the application layer (unlike the host layer). To store logs, download an agent on your EC2 instance.