CloudWatch Metrics, Logs, and Alarms

Amazon CloudWatch is a fully managed monitoring and observability service offered by AWS that helps us understand and manage the performance, health, and resource utilization of our cloud-based applications and infrastructure.

It allows us to collect, visualize, and act on telemetry data like logs, metrics, traces, and events. But what makes CloudWatch developer-friendly is its deep integration with core AWS services. It automatically starts logging when we deploy a Lambda function or launch an EC2 instance.

CloudWatch isn’t just a monitoring service. For developers, it’s like installing an external monitoring in the applications to log function calls, track execution time, capture failures, and even trigger alarms when something isn’t working as expected.

Key concepts of CloudWatch

Before we can effectively use Amazon CloudWatch as developers, we need to become comfortable with the core ideas behind how it collects, organizes, and analyzes telemetry data from our applications and AWS services.

CloudWatch metrics

Think of CloudWatch metrics as the vital signs of our AWS environment. It continuously tracks performance indicators like CPU utilization, memory consumption, latency, and request counts. Each metric is a time-ordered series of numerical data points that ...