What is AWS CloudWatch?

AWS CloudWatch is Amazon’s tracking and monitoring service. It is specifically implemented to track information that IT managers, DevOps engineers, and general developers can use to monitor their applications. It is also used to respond to changes in system performance and resource usage.

AWS CloudWatch has the potential to collect data in the form of metrics, events, and logs. All activity and monitoring data collected by CloudWatch is related to applications, services, and resources running on AWS. Let’s dig deeper…

AWS CloudWatch Functionality

• We can say that AWS CloudWatch is a metrics repository.
• Amazon EC2 places the metrics in the repository and gets statistics based on the metrics. These metrics and statistics can be used by developers to create graphic representations on CloudWatch dashboards.
• In addition to this, CloudWatch can implement alert actions that start, stop, and terminate EC2 instances when the criteria are met.
• It also allows developers to create alerts to initiate Amazon EC2 and Amazon SNS auto-scaling actions.
• AWS CloudWatch can monitor AWS service resources associated with Amazon RDS DB instances, Amazon EC2 instances and Amazon DynamoDB tables.
• It also helps you keep track of all custom metrics generated by services and apps.
• It also enables you to monitor the log files generated by your application in the AWS CloudWatch console.
  
  AWS CloudWatch provides better visibility into resource usage, application performance and operational health for seamless monitoring. These insights ensure that your applications run properly over the AWS environment.

Capabilities and Features of AWS CloudWatch

Compliance & Security

CloudWatch is integrated with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to control the resources and users with permission of data accessibility. Like all other Amazon services, For additional security, CloudWatch is integrated with FedRamp and PCI compliance. The data is then encrypted both at the time of storage and at the time of transfer. In addition, you can use AWS KMS encryption to encrypt all log groups for even greater data security.

Alarms and Automation on k8, ECS, and EKS Clusters

Within k8 and EKS clusters, the container insights allow you to alarm the compute metrics for sparking the auto-scaling policies over the Amazon EC2 scaling group. Additionally, you are capable of rebooting, recovering, terminating, and stopping any of the EC2 instances. For the ECS clusters, compute metrics can be used directly from your tasks and services for the Service Auto Scaling.

Auto Scaling

AWS CloudWatch’s auto-scaling automates the capacity and resource planning aspects. You can define a threshold to alarm on the key metrics and automatically trigger the auto-scaling actions.

Dashboard with Operational View

With CloudWatch dashboard you can re-usable create graphs, get an optimized view that enables you to visualize the cloud apps and resources. A single dashboard allows you to graph the logs and metrics for a quick analysis that helps identify the problems.

AWS CloudWatch Benefits 

CloudWatch offers many benefits to organizations that use AWS resources and applications. These relate to the information that CloudWatch can provide and its visual interface. It provides the ease of use of basic functions. Provides visibility into all AWS monitoring data on a single platform. Efficiently collect metrics for your AWS environment. Improve and optimize the performance of AWS and local resources. Provides information on correlations and other relationships in system operation. Brings stability and reliability. Provides integration with other AWS resources.

Wrap Up 

Are you using AWS CloudWatch? If not, use it to correlate, visualize, and analyze metrics and logs. Explore, analyze, and visualize the logs to address complex operational issues and enhance the performance of applications. To make the maximum of your investment, experience our AWS services and get in touch with our AWS conusltants.