Amazon Monitoring and Observability-Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch monitors your Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources and the applications you run on AWS in real time, and offers many tools to give you system-wide observability of your application performance, operational health, and resource utilization.

Metrics collect and track key performance data at user-defined intervals. Many AWS services automatically report metrics into CloudWatch, and you can also publish custom metrics in CloudWatch from your applications.

Dashboards offer a unified view of your resources and applications with visualizations of your metrics and logs in a single location.

You can set up alarms that continuously monitor CloudWatch metrics against user-defined thresholds. They can automatically alert you to breaches of the thresholds, and can also automatically respond to changes in your resources' behavior by triggering automated actions.

Application performance monitoring (APM)

With Application Signals you can automatically detect and monitor your applications' key performance indicators like latency, error rates, and request rates without manual instrumentation or code changes. Application Signals also provides curated dashboards so you can begin monitoring with a minimum of setup.

CloudWatch Synthetics complements this by enabling you to proactively monitor your endpoints and APIs through configurable scripts called canaries that simulate user behavior and alert you to availability issues or performance degradation before they impact real users. You can also use CloudWatch RUM to gather performance data from real user sessions.

Use Service Level Objectives (SLOs) in CloudWatch to define, track, and alert on specific reliability targets for your applications, helping you maintain service quality commitments by setting error budgets and monitoring SLO compliance over time.

Infrastructure monitoring

Many AWS services automatically send basic metrics to CloudWatch for free. Additionally, CloudWatch provides additional monitoring capabilities for several key pieces of AWS infrastructure:

• Database Insights allows you to monitor database performance metrics in real time, analyze SQL query performance, and troubleshoot database load issues for AWS database services. 
• Lambda Insights provides system-level metrics for Lambda functions, including memory and CPU utilization tracking, and cold start detection and analysis. 
• Container Insights allows you to collect and analyze metrics from containerized applications, on Amazon ECS clusters, Amazon EKS clusters, and self-managed Kubernetes clusters on Amazon EC2.

Collect, store, and query logs

CloudWatch Logs offers a suite of powerful features for comprehensive log management and analysis. Logs ingested from AWS services and custom applications are stored in log groups and streams for easy organization. Use CloudWatch Logs Insights to perform interactive, fast queries on your log data, with a choice of three query languages including SQL and PPL. Use log anomaly detection to find unusual patterns in log events in a log group, which can indicate issues. Create metric filters to extract numerical values from logs and generate CloudWatch metrics, which you can use for alerting and dashboards. Set up subscription filters to process and analyze logs in real-time or route them to other services like Amazon S3 or Firehose.

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Happy Exploring!