AWS CloudWatch
By Amazon Web Services
AWS CloudWatch is AWS's native monitoring and observability service that collects metrics, logs, and events from AWS resources and applications, and lets teams build dashboards, set alarms, and trigger automated actions in response to…
Definition
AWS CloudWatch is AWS's native monitoring and observability service that collects metrics, logs, and events from AWS resources and applications, and lets teams build dashboards, set alarms, and trigger automated actions in response to operational conditions.
Overview
CloudWatch is the default place AWS resources send telemetry. EC2 instances, Lambda functions, RDS databases, load balancers, and most other AWS services automatically publish metrics like CPU utilization, invocation counts, and error rates to CloudWatch, and CloudWatch Logs can collect application and system log streams from those same resources for search and analysis. On top of raw metrics and logs, CloudWatch provides Alarms, which watch a metric against a threshold and can trigger an SNS notification, an Auto Scaling action, or a Lambda function when conditions are breached — this is what commonly wires monitoring into Auto Scaling and incident response. CloudWatch Dashboards let teams visualize metrics from many services in one view, and CloudWatch Logs Insights supports ad-hoc querying across log groups without standing up a separate log pipeline. CloudWatch Synthetics and Application Insights extend this further into proactive endpoint monitoring and automated anomaly detection. CloudWatch plays the same role in AWS that Azure Monitor plays in Azure and Google Cloud's operations suite plays in GCP. For deeper distributed tracing and more advanced dashboards, many teams pair CloudWatch with tools like Grafana or Datadog, or route logs into a dedicated observability stack, but CloudWatch remains the baseline that almost every AWS workload uses out of the box. It's a core topic in the AWS Solutions Architect course.
Key Features
- Automatic collection of metrics from most AWS services with no extra setup
- CloudWatch Logs for centralized log storage, search, and retention
- Alarms that trigger notifications, Auto Scaling actions, or Lambda functions on threshold breaches
- Custom metrics API for publishing application-specific measurements
- Dashboards for visualizing metrics across services in a single view
- Logs Insights for fast, ad-hoc querying across large volumes of log data
- CloudWatch Events/EventBridge integration for reacting to operational state changes
- Synthetics for scripted, proactive monitoring of endpoints and user flows