CloudWatch

CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service offered by Amazon Web Services that collects and processes metrics, logs, and events from AWS resources, applications, and on-premises infrastructure. It provides visibility into system health, performance, and resource utilization to support operational monitoring and incident response.

CloudWatch gathers data from a wide range of sources. It collects metrics from AWS services such as EC2, RDS, Lambda, ECS, and DynamoDB, as well as from on-premises servers and applications via the CloudWatch Agent. In addition to metrics, CloudWatch stores log data through CloudWatch Logs and supports custom metrics, logs, and events ingestion through API calls and SDKs. Data can be retained for varying periods, and dashboards enable consolidated visualization.

Key features include dashboards for real-time and historical visualization, alarms that trigger notifications or automated actions when thresholds are crossed, and metric math for deriving new insights from existing data. CloudWatch Logs provides centralized log management, while Logs Insights offers interactive querying and analysis. Other capabilities include anomaly detection, Contributor Insights for identifying top contributors to log data, and integration with AWS automation services such as SNS, Systems Manager, Step Functions, and Lambda for remediation workflows.

Access to CloudWatch is controlled through AWS Identity and Access Management, with resource-based policies and encryption options to meet security requirements. CloudWatch is region-based, and pricing is usage-based, varying by data type, retention, and features used.

Typical use cases include operations monitoring, performance optimization, incident investigation, and automated remediation for AWS resources and cloud-native applications.