Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for AWS resources, allowing users to collect metrics, set alarms, and gain visibility into resource utilization and application performance. Users can create customizable dashboards, monitor both built-in and custom metrics, and respond to state changes with CloudWatch Events. It supports detailed monitoring, alarm creation, and log aggregation for enhanced operational insights.

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2. Amazon Web Services
CloudWatch

3. What is Cloud Watch
➢ Amazon CloudWatch monitors your Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources and the applications you run on
AWS in real time.
➢ You can use CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, which are variables you can measure for your
resources and applications.
➢ CloudWatch alarms send notifications or automatically make changes to the resources you are monitoring
based on rules that you define.
➢ In addition to monitoring the built-in metrics that come with AWS, you can monitor your own custom metrics.
➢ With CloudWatch, you gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and
operational health.
➢ By default all EC2 instances have Basic Monitoring ON.
➢ Under free tier EC2 machine is polled every 5 minutes.The detailed monitoring polls the EC2 instance every 1
minute.

4. How Amazon CloudWatch Works
➢ Amazon CloudWatch is basically a metrics repository. An AWS service such Amazon EC2 puts metrics into
the repository, and you retrieve statistics based on those metrics.
➢ You can use metrics to calculate statistics and then present the data graphically in the CloudWatch console.
➢ You can configure alarm actions to stop, start, or terminate an Amazon EC2 instance when certain criteria are
met.
➢ you can create alarms that initiate Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and Amazon Simple Notification Service actions
on your behalf.
➢ Amazon CloudWatch does not aggregate data across regions. Therefore, metrics are completely separate
between regions.

5. How Amazon CloudWatch Works

6. CloudWatch Concepts
➢A namespace is a container for CloudWatch metrics. Metrics in different namespaces are isolated from each
other. The AWS namespaces use the following naming convention: AWS/service.
➢A metric represents a time-ordered set of data points that are published to CloudWatch.
For example, the CPU usage of a particular EC2 instance is one metric provided by Amazon EC2.
➢A dimension is a name/value pair that uniquely identifies a metric. You can assign up to 10 dimensions to a
metric.
➢Statistics are metric data aggregations over specified periods of time. Aggregations are made using the
namespace, metric name, dimensions, and the data point unit of measure, within the time period you specify.
➢A percentile indicates the relative standing of a value in a dataset. For example, the 95th percentile means that
95 percent of the data is lower than this value and 5 percent of the data is higher than this value.
➢You can use an alarm to automatically initiate actions on your behalf. An alarm watches a single metric over a
specified time period, and performs one or more specified actions, based on the value of the metric relative to a
threshold over time.

7. CloudWatch Dashboards
➢Amazon CloudWatch dashboards are customizable home pages in the CloudWatch console that you can
use to monitor your resources in a single view
➢Amazon CloudWatch dashboards are customizable home pages in the CloudWatch console that you can
use to monitor your resources in a single view

8. CloudWatch Dashboards Features
➢Create a dashboard
➢Add or Remove a Graph
➢Move or Resize a Graph
➢Edit a Graph
➢Rename a Graph
➢Add or Remove a Text Widget
➢Add or Remove an Alarm
➢Monitor Resources in Multiple Regions
➢Link and Unlink Graphs
➢Add a Dashboard to your Favorites list
➢Change the Refresh Interval
➢Change the Time Range or Time Zone Format

9. CloudWatch Metrics
➢Metrics are data about the performance of your systems.
➢By default, several services provide free metrics for resources such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EBS
volumes, and Amazon RDS DB instances
➢You can also enable detailed monitoring for some resources, such as your Amazon EC2 instances, or publish
your own application metrics.
➢Amazon CloudWatch can load all the metrics in your account (both AWS resource metrics and application
metrics that you provide) for search, graphing, and alarms.
➢Metric data is kept for a period of 15 months, enabling you to view both up-to-the-minute data and historical
data.

10. Metrics Features
➢ View available Metrics
➢ Search available Metrics
➢Get statistics for a Metric
➢Graph Metrics
➢Publish Custom Metrics
➢Use Math Metrics

11. CloudWatch Agent
The CloudWatch agent enables you to do the following:
Collect more system-level metrics from Amazon EC2 instances, including in-guest metrics, in addition to the
metrics listed in Amazon EC2 Metrics and dimensions
Collect system-level metrics from on-premises servers.
Collect logs from Amazon EC2 instances and on-premises servers, running either Linux or Windows Server.

12. CloudWatch Alarms
➢You can create a CloudWatch alarm that watches a single metric.
➢Alarms invoke actions for sustained state changes only.
➢After an alarm invokes an action due to a change in state, its subsequent behavior depends on the type of
action that you have associated with the alarm.
➢You can also add alarms to dashboards. When an alarm is on a dashboard, it turns red when it is in
the ALARM state, making it easier for you to monitor its status proactively.
➢An alarm has the following states:
OK - The metric is within the defined threshold
ALARM - The metric is outside of the defined threshold
INSUFFICIENT_DATA - The alarm has just started, the metric is not available, or not enough data
is available for the metric to determine the alarm state

13. CloudWatch Events
➢CloudWatch Events helps you to respond to state changes in your AWS resources.
➢When your resources change state they automatically send events into an event stream.
➢ You can create rules that match selected events in the stream and route them to targets to take action.
➢You can also use rules to take action on a pre-determined schedule.
➢Examples to configure Rules
1.Take a snapshot of an Amazon EBS volume on a schedule
2. Automatically invoke an AWS Lambda function to update DNS entries when an event notifies you
that Amazon EC2 instance enters the Running state

14. CloudWatch Logs
➢CloudWatch Logs helps you to aggregate, monitor, and store logs.
➢For example, you can:
1. Monitor HTTP response codes in Apache logs
2. Receive alarms for errors in kernel logs
3. Count exceptions in application logs

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