Amazon CloudWatch

While it’s essential to be quick and efficient when operating our cloud infrastructure, it’s equally important to govern it according to our organization’s guidelines and compliance standards.

Amazon CloudWatch is one such service that helps us govern the cloud infrastructure. This is because the Amazon CloudWatch service provides us with observability of any services and resources that are deployed on the AWS cloud, as well as any on-premises infrastructures or other cloud infrastructures.

With this observability, we can respond to any drastic changes in the infrastructure or identify and optimize any resources acting as bottlenecks within the infrastructure.

Introduction to Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch is an AWS tool used primarily for monitoring cloud infrastructures, including those infrastructures that exist on clouds other than AWS or on-premises. CloudWatch tracks and collects insights, called metrics, from the monitored AWS resources in the form of a time-ordered set of data points.

CloudWatch also offers a centralized logging system, called CloudWatch logs, that allows us to collect, compile, and analyze any log files from various AWS resources. With CloudWatch logs, we can detect real-time operational changes in cloud resources.

We can utilize these logs by setting up a CloudWatch alarm, which gets triggered when a metric crosses a predefined limit and, in turn, also triggers a CloudWatch event. CloudWatch events are the appropriate actions we need to perform in the cloud as an automated response. These CloudWatch events can be both time-based and event-based.

Key concepts

Here’s a list of key CloudWatch concepts that we need to know about:

• Metrics: We can define a metric as a quantifiable measure for tracking and assessing a resource or service’s status, performance, and availability. As previously discussed, a metric represents a set of time-ordered data points about the specific aspects of a resource, such as CPU usage, memory consumption, or network traffic, providing valuable insights into the operational state of that resource.

  • Namespaces: A container of CloudWatch metrics can be described as and called a namespace. Using namespaces, we can isolate metrics from different applications to avoid them being amalgamated and read within ...