Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service originally built for DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT managers. CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events from AWS resources, applications, and services that run on AWS and on-premises servers. With investment in staff skillsets and configuration, CloudWatch can be used to detect anomalous behavior in your environments, set alarms, visualize logs and metrics side by side, take automated actions, troubleshoot issues, and discover insights to keep applications running smoothly.
CloudWatch can be used to monitor more than 70 AWS services, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and AWS Lambda. It automatically publishes 1-minute metrics and custom metrics with up to 1-second granularity. You can also use CloudWatch in hybrid cloud architectures by using the CloudWatch Agent or API to monitor your on-premises resources to some extent.
CloudWatch is the native tool built into AWS services. Hence, it is easiest monitoring to deploy and use. Support is from one vendor for your cloud services and monitoring – AWS. Yet another advantage is billing for CloudWatch is integrated into AWS’ overall billing. For many basic users of AWS services, CloudWatch is the most suitable tool as it allows you to monitor a small number of basic metrics for free. However, for more complex needs, you might outgrow CloudWatch and look for an alternative like eG Enterprise. Learn more about eG Enterprise is a compelling alternative to Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring AWS.
