AWS CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It enables you to monitor, manage, and analyze your cloud infrastructure and applications in real-time. CloudWatch collects and tracks metrics, logs, and events from AWS resources, applications, and on-premises servers. It helps you to ensure that your systems are performing as expected and to take actions based on specific triggers or thresholds.
Key Features of AWS CloudWatch :
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Metrics Collection
- CloudWatch collects and stores various metrics for AWS services such as EC2, RDS, Lambda, S3, and many others. These metrics include resource utilization, application performance, and operational health.
- You can create custom metrics to track specific application or system data.
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Logs Monitoring
- CloudWatch allows you to collect, store, and analyze logs from various AWS services and applications. You can centralize your log data to monitor the behavior of your systems and applications, identify performance issues, and troubleshoot errors.
- CloudWatch Logs Insights helps analyze and query logs interactively.
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Alarms and Notifications
- CloudWatch enables you to set up alarms that notify you when certain metrics cross predefined thresholds (e.g., CPU usage exceeds 80% or a disk space threshold is breached).
- Alarms can trigger automatic actions like scaling up resources, stopping an instance, or sending notifications via Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service).
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Dashboards
- CloudWatch provides customizable dashboards to visualize your metrics and logs in a graphical format. You can create one or more dashboards to track the status of your AWS resources and applications in real-time.
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Event Monitoring (CloudWatch Events)
- CloudWatch Events provides near real-time event monitoring. You can track changes in the state of AWS resources or applications and trigger automated workflows or notifications.
- Events can be used to automate tasks like starting or stopping EC2 instances, invoking Lambda functions, or scaling resources dynamically.
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CloudWatch Synthetics
- CloudWatch Synthetics enables you to create canaries—scripts that simulate user interactions with your web applications to monitor availability and performance.
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CloudWatch ServiceLens
- CloudWatch ServiceLens provides a comprehensive view of your distributed application’s health and performance by integrating with AWS X-Ray. It helps you visualize and troubleshoot the end-to-end performance of your services.
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Anomaly Detection
- CloudWatch Anomaly Detection uses machine learning models to detect abnormal behavior in your metrics over time, such as unusual traffic patterns or resource utilization spikes.
