Amazon CloudWatch provides a reliable, scalable, and flexible monitoring solution that you can start using within minutes. You no longer need to set up, manage, and scale your own monitoring systems and infrastructure.
Amazon CloudWatch enables you to monitor your AWS resources in near real-time, including Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EBS volumes, Elastic Load Balancers, and Amazon RDS DB instances. Metrics such as CPU utilization, latency, and request counts are provided automatically for these AWS resources. You can also supply your own logs or custom application and system metrics, such as memory usage, transaction volumes, or error rates, and Amazon CloudWatch will monitor these too.
With Amazon CloudWatch, you can access up-to-the-minute statistics, view graphs, and set alarms for your metric data to help you troubleshoot, spot trends, and take automated action based on the state of your cloud environment. Amazon CloudWatch functionality is accessible via API, command-line tools, the AWS SDK, and the AWS Management Console.
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Create a Free AccountAWS Free Tier includes 10 Metrics, 10 Alarms, and 1,000,000 API requests with Amazon Cloudwatch.
Monitor EC2 instances automatically, without installing additional software:
- Basic Monitoring for Amazon EC2 instances: Seven pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency and three status check metrics at one-minute frequency, for no additional charge.
- Detailed Monitoring for Amazon EC2 instances: All metrics available to Basic Monitoring at one-minute frequency, for an additional charge. Instances with Detailed Monitoring enabled allows data aggregation by Amazon EC2 AMI ID and instance type.
Amazon CloudWatch automatically monitors Elastic Load Balancers for metrics such as request count and latency; Amazon EBS volumes for metrics such as read/write latency; Amazon RDS DB instances for metrics such as freeable memory and available storage space; Amazon SQS queues for metrics such as number of messages sent and received; and Amazon SNS topics for metrics such as number of messages published and delivered. No additional software needs to be installed to monitor other AWS resources.
Below is a list of all supported AWS resources:
- Auto Scaling groups: seven pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, optional and for no additional charge.
- Elastic Load Balancers: thirteen pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, for no additional charge.
- Amazon Route 53 health checks: One pre-selected metric at one-minute frequency, for no additional charge.
- Amazon EBS PIOPS (SSD) volumes: ten pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, for no additional charge.
- Amazon EBS General Purpose (SSD) volumes: ten pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, for no additional charge.
- Amazon EBS Magnetic volumes: eight pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, for no additional charge.
- AWS Storage Gateways: eleven pre-selected gateway metrics and five pre-selected storage volume metrics at five-minute frequency, for no additional charge.
- Amazon CloudFront: six pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, for no additional charge.
No additional software needs to be installed.
- Amazon DynamoDB tables: seven pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, for no additional charge.
- Amazon ElastiCache nodes: thirty-nine pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, for no additional charge.
- Amazon RDS DB instances: fourteen pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, for no additional charge.
- Amazon Elastic MapReduce job flows: twenty-six pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, for no additional charge.
- Amazon Redshift: Sixteen pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, for no additional charge.
No additional software needs to be installed.
- Amazon SNS topics: four pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, for no additional charge.
- Amazon SQS queues: eight pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency, for no additional charge.
- AWS Opsworks: fifteen pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, for no additional charge.
- Amazon CloudWatch Logs: six pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, for no additional charge.
- Estimated charges on your AWS bill: you can also choose to enable metrics to monitor your AWS charges. The number of metrics depends on the AWS products and services that you use, and these metrics are at no additional charge. Learn more about this option.
For more details about AWS resource metrics, please see the Amazon CloudWatch Developer Guide.
Submit Custom Metrics generated by your own applications (or by AWS resources not mentioned above) and have them monitored by Amazon CloudWatch. You can submit these metrics to Amazon CloudWatch via a simple API request. All the same Amazon CloudWatch functionality will be available at up to one-minute frequency for your own custom metric data, including statistics, graphs, and alarms.
CloudWatch Logs lets you monitor and troubleshoot your systems and applications using your existing system, application, and custom log files.
With CloudWatch Logs, you can monitor your logs, in near real-time, for specific phrases, values or patterns (metrics). For example, you could set an alarm on the number of errors that occur in your system logs or view graphs of web request latencies from your application logs. You can view the original log data to see the source of the problem if needed. Log data can be stored and accessed for as long as you need using highly durable, low-cost storage so you don’t have to worry about filling up hard drives.
Set alarms on any of your metrics to receive notifications or take other automated actions when your metric crosses your specified threshold. You can use alarms to detect and shut down Amazon EC2 instances that are unused or underutilized.
You can also use Auto Scaling to add or remove Amazon EC2 instances dynamically based on your Amazon CloudWatch metrics.
With Amazon CloudWatch dashboards, you can create re-usable dashboards which allow you to monitor your AWS resources in one location. Metric data is kept for a period of two weeks enabling you to view up to the minute data and also historical data.
Amazon CloudWatch Events enables you to respond quickly to application availability issues or resource changes, with notifications from AWS services delivered in near-real-time. You simply write rules to indicate which events are of interest to your application and what automated action to take when a rule matches an event. You can, for example, invoke AWS Lambda functions or notify an Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic. You can also emit events on a schedule.
