CloudWatch

Overview

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service built for DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT managers. CloudWatch provides data and actionable insights to monitor applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health.

• Collect and track metrics
• Collect and monitor log files
• set alarms
• Monitor resources
  • EC2
  • DynamoDB tables
  • Relational Database Service instances
  • Custom metrics generated by your apps and services
  • any log files your apps generate

CloudWatch Metrics

• CloudWatch provides metrics for every service in AWS
• Metric is any variable to monitor, a few examples include:
  • CPUUtilization
  • Networking
  • Bucket size in s3
  • etc
• Metrics belong to namespaces
• A Dimension is an attribute of a metric
  • a few examples include:
    • instance ID
    • environment
    • etc…
  • You can have up to 30 dimensions per metric

CloudWatch Logs

• The perfect place to store your application logs in AWS. To do so, you must first define:
  • Log Groups: arbitrary name, usually representing an application. Within these groups are:
    • Log Stream: instances within application/ log files/ containers
• You can definite expiry policies
  • Never expire
  • 1 day to 10 years
• It is possible to send your logs to various destinations
  • S3
  • Kinesis Data Streams
  • Kinesis Data Firehose
  • Lambda
  • OpenSearch
• All logs are encrypted by default
• Can setup KMS-based encryption with your own keys

CloudWatch Logs - Sources

• What kind of logs data goes into CloudWatch Logs?
  • SDK
  • CloudWatch Logs Agent (deprecated)
  • CloudWatch Unified Agent
  • Elastic Beanstalk
    • collection of logs from application
  • ECS
    • Collection from containers
  • Lambda
    • collection from function logs
  • VPC Flow logs:
    • VPC specific metadata network traffic logs
  • API Gateway
    • will send all reqs made to api gateway into cloudwatch
  • CloudTrail
    • send logs based on filter
  • Route 53
    • log DNS queries

CloudWatch Logs Insights

• Querying capability within CloudWatch logs

• Specify time-frame for which to apply query

• Results as visualizations

• View specific log lines which made aforementioned visualization

• search and analyze log data stored in CloudWatch Logs

CloudWatch Internet Weather Map

Featured within CloudWatch Internet Monitor, The Internet Weather Map provides a global overview of internet events affecting performance and availability the entire world over.

It is available to all AWS customers, displaying outages, highlighting specific cities and networks involved

Shows current issues and those resolved in the past 24 hours, allowing users to understand and localize internet disruptions affecting their services or regions of interest. This tool is particularly useful for monitoring internet conditions that might impact applications hosted on AWS, giving an overall view of global internet health.

Key words

• resource performance monitoring
• events
• alerts