What is AWS CloudWatch?

CloudWatch is one of the services provided by Amazon as part of Amazon Web Services. It is basically a real time monitoring tool for all the other services that Amazon provides, like Amazon EC2, S3, Amazon EBS, Amazon Elastic load balancers, Amazon RDS database etc.

It can be accessed via the AWS Management console. How it works is that, via CloudWatch, users can set limits on specific metrics which are key to the services they are using. Amazon CloudWatch provides a list of such metrics predefined which can be used out of the box, although users can make their own custom metrics as well. Whenever a metric breaches its threshold or limits, CloudWatch will raise an alarm. Users can choose the way they would be notified when any such event happens using AWS’s Simple Notification Services. The current options mostly include emails or SMSs but users can avail more notification options like phone/web push notifications using tools like SpectrumApp.io.

Overall CloudWatch is a good, fast and reliable tool and it serves a good purpose but maybe not with a good user Interface or user Experience.

Most DevOps engineers use tools like Spectrum to make it easy to use CloudWatch and to get additional features like dashboard-sharing, push notifications, multiple AWS login etc.

What has been your experience with CloudWatch? Love it? Hate it? Add it in the comments below!