Amazon CloudWatch
Observability of your AWS resources and applications
Overview
Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service built for DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT managers. CloudWatch provides you with data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health.
✨ Key Features
- Metrics collection and monitoring
- Log aggregation and analysis (CloudWatch Logs)
- Alarms and automated actions
- Dashboards for visualization
- Event-driven computing (CloudWatch Events)
- Application and infrastructure monitoring
🎯 Key Differentiators
- Deep integration with the AWS ecosystem
- Unified platform for metrics, logs, and events
- Cost-effective for monitoring AWS resources
Unique Value: Provides essential, deeply integrated monitoring and automation capabilities for any workload running on AWS, serving as the core of operational visibility.
🎯 Use Cases (5)
✅ Best For
- Setting an alarm on high CPU utilization for an EC2 instance that triggers an auto-scaling action
- Searching for error messages in application logs from multiple servers
💡 Check With Vendor
Verify these considerations match your specific requirements:
- Advanced Application Performance Monitoring (APM) with code-level tracing (better with Datadog/New Relic or AWS X-Ray)
- Complex, multi-cloud monitoring
🏆 Alternatives
While third-party observability platforms offer more advanced features and multi-cloud support, CloudWatch is the indispensable, built-in solution for monitoring AWS resource health and triggering automated actions.
💻 Platforms
🔌 Integrations
🛟 Support Options
- ✓ Email Support
- ✓ Live Chat
- ✓ Phone Support
- ✓ Dedicated Support (AWS Business Support tier)
🔒 Compliance & Security
💰 Pricing
Free tier: Includes basic monitoring metrics, 10 detailed monitoring metrics, 1 million API requests, 5 GB of log data ingestion, etc.
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