Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications you run on AWS. You can use Amazon CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, set alarms, and automatically react to changes in your AWS resources. Amazon CloudWatch can monitor AWS resources such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon DynamoDB tables, and Amazon RDS DB instances, as well as custom metrics generated by your applications and services, and any log files your applications generate. You can use Amazon CloudWatch to gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health. You can use these insights to react and keep your application running smoothly.
Get Started with AWS for Free
Create a Free AccountAWS Free Tier includes 10 Metrics, 10 Alarms, and 1,000,000 API requests with Amazon CloudWatch.
View metrics for CPU utilization, data transfer, and disk usage activity from Amazon EC2 instances (Basic Monitoring) for no additional charge. For an additional charge, CloudWatch provides Detailed Monitoring for EC2 instances with higher resolution and metric aggregation. No additional software needs to be installed.
Monitor metrics on Amazon DynamoDB tables, Amazon EBS volumes, Amazon RDS DB instances, Amazon Elastic MapReduce job flows, Elastic Load Balancers, Amazon SQS queues, Amazon SNS topics, and more for no additional charge. No additional software needs to be installed.
Submit Custom Metrics generated by your own applications via a simple API request and have them monitored by Amazon CloudWatch. You can send and store metrics that are important to your application’s operational performance to help you troubleshoot and spot trends.
You can use CloudWatch Logs to monitor and troubleshoot your systems and applications using your existing system, application, and custom log files. You can send your existing system, application, and custom log files to CloudWatch Logs and monitor these logs in near real-time. This can help you better understand and operate your systems and applications, and you can store your logs using highly durable, low-cost storage for later access.
Set alarms on any of your metrics to send you notifications or take other automated actions. For example, when a specific Amazon EC2 metric crosses your alarm threshold, you can use Auto Scaling to dynamically add or remove EC2 instances or send you a notification.
Amazon Cloudwatch Dashboards enable you to create re-usable graphs of AWS resources and custom metrics so you can quickly monitor operational status and identify issues at a glance. Metric data is kept for a period of fifteen months enabling you to view up to the minute data and also historical data. Amazon CloudWatch can load all the metrics in your account for search and graphing with the AWS Management Console. This includes logs, AWS resource metrics, and application metrics that you provide.
CloudWatch Events provides a stream of events describing changes to your AWS resources. You can easily build workflows that automatically take actions you define, such as invoking an AWS Lambda function, when an event of interest occurs.
