Amazon CloudWatch FAQs

General

What is Amazon CloudWatch?

Amazon CloudWatch is an AWS monitoring service for cloud resources and the applications that you run on AWS. You can use Amazon CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, and set alarms. Amazon CloudWatch can monitor AWS resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon DynamoDB tables, and Amazon RDS DB instances, in addition to custom metrics generated by your applications and services, and any log files that your applications generate, hosted on premises, hybrid, or on other clouds. 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.

To get started with monitoring, you can use Automatic Dashboards with built-in AWS best practices, explore account and resource-based view of metrics and alarms, and easily drill down to understand the root cause of performance issues.

What can I use to access CloudWatch?

Amazon CloudWatch can be accessed via API, command-line interface, AWS SDKs, and the AWS Management Console.

Which operating systems does Amazon CloudWatch support?

Amazon CloudWatch receives and provides metrics for all Amazon EC2 instances and should work with any operating system currently supported by the Amazon EC2 service.

What access management policies can I implement for CloudWatch?

Amazon CloudWatch integrates with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) so that you can specify which CloudWatch actions a user in your AWS Account can perform. For example, you could create an IAM policy that gives only certain users in your organization permission to use GetMetricStatistics. They could then use the action to retrieve data about your cloud resources.

You can't use IAM to control access to CloudWatch data for specific resources. For example, you can't give a user access to CloudWatch data for only a specific set of instances or a specific LoadBalancer. Permissions granted using IAM cover all the cloud resources you use with CloudWatch. In addition, you can't use IAM roles with the Amazon CloudWatch command line tools.

What is Amazon CloudWatch Logs?

With CloudWatch Logs, you can monitor your logs, in near real time, for specific phrases, values or patterns. For example, you could set an alarm on the number of errors that occur in your system logs or view graphs of latency of web requests from your application logs. You can then view the original log data to see the source of the problem. Log data can be stored and accessed indefinitely in highly durable, low-cost storage so you don’t have to worry about filling up hard drives.
Amazon CloudWatch Logs lets you monitor and troubleshoot your systems and applications using your existing system, application, and custom log files.

What kinds of things can I do with CloudWatch Logs?

CloudWatch Logs is capable of monitoring and storing your logs to help you better understand and operate your systems and applications. You can use CloudWatch Logs in a number of ways.

Real-time application and system monitoring: You can use CloudWatch Logs to monitor applications and systems using log data. For example, CloudWatch Logs can track the number of errors that occur in your application logs and send you a notification whenever the rate of errors exceeds a threshold you specify. CloudWatch Logs uses your log data for monitoring, so no code changes are required.

Long-term log retention: You can use CloudWatch Logs to store your log data indefinitely in highly durable and cost effective storage without worrying about hard drives running out of space. The CloudWatch Logs Agent makes it easy to quickly move both rotated and non-rotated log files off of a host and into the log service. You can then access the raw log event data when you need it.

What platforms does the CloudWatch Logs Agent support?

The CloudWatch Logs Agent is supported on Amazon Linux, Ubuntu, CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Windows. This agent will support the ability to monitor individual log files on the host.

Does the CloudWatch Logs Agent support IAM roles?

Yes. The CloudWatch Logs Agent is integrated with Identity and Access Management (IAM) and includes support for both access keys and IAM roles.

What is Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights?

Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights is an interactive, pay-as-you-go, and integrated log analytics capability for CloudWatch Logs. It helps developers, operators, and systems engineers understand, improve, and debug their applications, by allowing them to search and visualize their logs. Logs Insights is fully integrated with CloudWatch, enabling you to manage, explore, and analyze your logs. You can also leverage CloudWatch Metrics, Alarms and Dashboards with Logs to get full operational visibility into your applications. This empowers you to understand your applications, make improvements, and find and fix problems quickly, so that you can continue to innovate rapidly. You can write queries with aggregations, filters, and regular expressions to derive actionable insights from your logs. You can also visualize timeseries data, drill down into individual log events, and export your query results to CloudWatch Dashboards.

How can I get started with CloudWatch Logs Insights?

You can immediately start using Logs Insights to run queries on all your logs being sent to CloudWatch Logs. There is no setup required and no infrastructure to manage. You can access Logs Insights from the AWS Management Console or programmatically through your applications by using the AWS SDK.

What is Amazon CloudWatch Anomaly Detection?

Amazon CloudWatch Anomaly Detection applies machine-learning algorithms to continuously analyze single time series of systems and applications, determine a normal baseline, and surface anomalies with minimal user intervention. It allows you to create alarms that auto-adjust thresholds based on natural metric patterns, such as time of day, day of week, seasonality, or changing trends. You can also visualize metrics with anomaly detection bands on dashboards, monitoring, isolating, and troubleshooting unexpected changes in your metrics.

How can I get started with Amazon CloudWatch Anomaly Detection?

It is easy to get started with Anomaly Detection. In the CloudWatch console, go to Alarms in the navigation pane to create an alarm, or start with Metrics to overlay the metric’s expected values onto the graph as a band. You can also enable Anomaly Detection using the AWS CLI, AWS SDKs, or AWS CloudFormation templates. To learn more, please visit the CloudWatch Anomaly Detection documentation  and pricing pages.

What is Amazon CloudWatch Contributor Insights?

Amazon CloudWatch now includes Contributor Insights, which analyzes time-series data to provide a view of the top contributors influencing system performance. Once set up, Contributor Insights runs continuously without needing additional user intervention. This helps developers and operators more quickly isolate, diagnose, and remediate issues during an operational event.

How can I get started with CloudWatch Contributor Insights?

In the CloudWatch console, go to Contributor Insights in the navigation pane to create a Contributor Insights rule. You can also enable Contributor Insights using the AWS CLI, AWS SDKs, or AWS CloudFormation templates. Contributor Insights is available in all commercial AWS Regions. To learn more, please visit the documentation on CloudWatch Contributor Insights.

What is Amazon CloudWatch ServiceLens?

Amazon CloudWatch ServiceLens is a feature that enables you to visualize and analyze the health, performance, and availability of your applications in a single place. CloudWatch ServiceLens ties together CloudWatch metrics and logs as well as traces from AWS X-Ray to give you a complete view of your applications and their dependencies. This enables you to quickly pinpoint performance bottlenecks, isolate root causes of application issues, and determine users impacted. CloudWatch ServiceLens enables you to gain visibility into your applications in three main areas: Infrastructure monitoring (using metrics and logs to understand the resources supporting your applications), transaction monitoring (using traces to understand dependencies between your resources), and end user monitoring (using canaries to monitor your endpoints and notify you when your end user experience has degraded).

How can I get started with CloudWatch ServiceLens?

If you already use AWS X-Ray, you can access CloudWatch ServiceLens on the CloudWatch console by default. If you do not yet use AWS X-Ray, you can get started by enabling AWS X-Ray on your applications using the X-Ray SDK. Amazon CloudWatch ServiceLens is available in all public AWS Regions where AWS-X-Ray is available. To learn more, visit the documentation on Amazon CloudWatch ServiceLens.

What is Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics?

Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics allows you to monitor application endpoints more easily. It runs tests on your endpoints every minute, 24x7, and alerts you as soon as your application endpoints don’t behave as expected. These tests can be customized to check for availability, latency, transactions, broken or dead links, step by step task completions, page load errors, load latencies for UI assets, complex wizard flows, or checkout flows in your applications. You can also use CloudWatch Synthetics to isolate alarming application endpoints and map them back to underlying infrastructure issues to reduce mean time to resolution.

How can I get started with CloudWatch Synthetics?

It's easy to get started with CloudWatch Synthetics. You can write your first passing canary in minutes. To learn more, visit the documentation on Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics .