AWS CloudWatch: Introduction

By Jayant Sharma

Introduction

Amazon CloudWatch is a component of Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides monitoring for AWS resources and the customer applications running on the AWS instances. It enables real time monitoring of AWS resources like AWS EBS, AWS EC2 Instances, AWS RDS etc. It also provides matrices for CPU utilization, latency, and other useful parameters. It is used in order to make sure that all the resources as well the applications are working under the threshold limit. Once the defined threshold limit changes CloudWatch alarms sends the notification or automatically makes the changes to the resources as the rules defined by you. Users can access CloudWatch functions through an API, command-line tools or the AWS Management Console. The CloudWatch interface provides current statistics that can be viewed in graph format.

Amazon CloudWatch Features

The cloudwatch provides some useful features as follows:

• Collect
• Monitor
• Act 
• Analyze
• Security

Collect 

The Amazon CloudWatch easily collect and store logs i.e. it allows you to collect and store logs from your resources, applications, and services in near real-time.

It also allows you to collect default metrics from AWS services, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, AWS Lambda etc without any action on your part.

It also allows you to collect custom metrics from your own applications to monitor operational performance, troubleshoot issues, and spot trends

Monitor

Amazon CloudWatch dashboards enable you to create re-usable graphs and visualize your cloud resources and applications in a unified view. You can visualize key metrics, like CPU utilization and memory, and compare them to capacity.

Amazon CloudWatch also makes it easy to correlate metrics and logs. This helps you quickly go from diagnosing the problem to understanding the root cause.

Act

It Supports Auto Scaling. Auto Scaling helps you automate capacity and resource planning. You can set a threshold to alarm on a key metric and trigger an automated Auto Scaling action. For example, you could set up an Auto Scaling workflow to add or remove EC2 instances based on CPU utilization metrics and optimize resource costs. 

Cloud watch allows you to respond quickly to operational changes and take corrective action.

Analyze

Amazon CloudWatch allows you to monitor trends and seasonality with 15 months of metric data (storage and retention). This data allows you to perform historical analysis to fine-tune resource utilization.

Security

Amazon CloudWatch is integrated with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) so that you can control which users and resources have permission to access your data and how they can access it.

Amazon CloudWatch Concepts

Metrics

Metrics are the fundamental concept in CloudWatch. A metric represents a time-ordered set of data points that are published to CloudWatch. Think of a metric as a variable to monitor, and the data points represent the values of that variable over time.

Namespaces

A namespace is a container for CloudWatch metrics. Metrics in different namespaces are isolated from each other, so that metrics from different applications are not mistakenly aggregated into the same statistics.

Dimensions

A dimension is a name/value pair that uniquely identifies a metric. You can assign up to 10 dimensions to a metric.

Statistics

Statistics are metric data aggregations over specified periods of time. CloudWatch provides statistics based on the metric data points provided by your custom data or provided by other AWS services to CloudWatch. Aggregations are made using the namespace, metric name, dimensions, and the data point unit of measure, within the time period you specify. 

Alarm

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. 

Amazon CloudWatch Pricing

As we all know that while working with Amazon web services, the main problem we always used to get to know about is the pricing and billing for using them.

With Amazon CloudWatch, there is no up-front commitment or minimum fee. i.e. you simply pay for what you use. You will be charged at the end of the month for your usage.

For Free tier,

You can get started with Amazon CloudWatch for free.