Amazon CloudWatch
Observability of your AWS resources and applications
Overview
Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service built for DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT managers. CloudWatch provides you with data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health.
✨ Key Features
- Metrics collection and monitoring
- Log aggregation and analysis (CloudWatch Logs)
- Alarms and automated actions
- Customizable dashboards
- Application and infrastructure monitoring (CloudWatch Agent)
- Traces and service maps (via AWS X-Ray integration)
🎯 Key Differentiators
- Deep, native integration with all AWS services
- Primary driver for AWS-native automation (e.g., Auto Scaling, Lambda triggers)
- Cost-effective for basic monitoring needs
- Unified billing with other AWS services
Unique Value: Provides essential, deeply integrated monitoring and automation capabilities for any workload running on AWS, serving as the core of operational visibility.
🎯 Use Cases (5)
✅ Best For
- Setting an alarm on high CPU utilization for an EC2 instance that triggers an auto-scaling action
- Searching for error messages in application logs from multiple servers
💡 Check With Vendor
Verify these considerations match your specific requirements:
- Advanced Application Performance Monitoring (APM) with code-level tracing (better with Datadog/New Relic or AWS X-Ray)
- Complex, multi-cloud monitoring
🏆 Alternatives
While third-party observability platforms offer more advanced features and multi-cloud support, CloudWatch is the indispensable, built-in solution for monitoring AWS resource health and triggering automated actions.
💻 Platforms
🔌 Integrations
🛟 Support Options
- ✓ Email Support
- ✓ Live Chat
- ✓ Phone Support
- ✓ Dedicated Support (AWS Business Support tier)
🔒 Compliance & Security
💰 Pricing
Free tier: Includes basic monitoring metrics, 10 detailed monitoring metrics, 1 million API requests, 5 GB of log data ingestion, etc.
🔄 Similar Tools in AWS Automation
AWS CloudFormation
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) service to provision and manage AWS and third-party resources....
AWS Systems Manager
A unified interface for managing and automating operational tasks across AWS resources....
AWS Lambda
A serverless, event-driven compute service for running code for virtually any type of application....
AWS Step Functions
A serverless function orchestrator to coordinate multiple AWS services into workflows....
AWS Config
A service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources....
Amazon EventBridge
A serverless event bus that connects application data from your own apps, SaaS, and AWS services....