Getting started with AWS CloudWatch
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- CloudWatch alarms
- CloudWatch events
- CloudWatch logs
- CloudWatch metrics
- Conclusion: building better observable systems
Out of more than 100 services that Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides, Amazon CloudWatch was one of the earliest services provided by AWS. CloudWatch was announced on May 17th, 2009, and it was the 7th service released after S3, SQS, SimpleDB, EBS, EC2, and EMR.
AWS CloudWatch is a suite of tools that encompasses a wide range of cloud resources, including collecting logs and metrics; monitoring; visualization and alerting; and automated action in response to operational health changes. CloudWatch is an excellent tool because it allows you to go beyond monitoring into observability.
This article was written in partnership with MetricFire. If you’re interested in learning more about monitoring, check out MetricFire.com and sign up for our free trial.
1. Introduction to Observability
For some time now, observability has had an essential place in the cloud computing and modern software engineering ecosystem. The word is no longer just a simple buzzword, and Amazon has adapted to this by adding the tools and means to do proactive monitoring.
Indeed, you can have a lot of monitoring in place, but you may not have an observable system.
If you are new to observability, think of it as a measure of how well internal states of a system can be inferred from knowledge of its external outputs. In simpler words, monitoring is about the symptoms of a problem, and observability is about the (possible) root causes of it.
You can also think of observability as “the white box monitoring”. In this type of monitoring, logs, metrics, and traces are the pillars of observability.
In this blog post, we will discover the basics of CloudWatch, see some of its use cases and dive into the core concepts. To do this, we will focus on 4 main features that this service offers:
- Alarms
- Events
- Logs
- Metrics
2. CloudWatch Alarms
You can configure alarms to initiate an action when a condition is satisfied, like reaching a pre-configured threshold. To better understand this, let’s create an Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) machine. We don’t need a production instance, since either a nano or micro instance can be used.
When creating this instance, make sure to enable CloudWatch detailed monitoring, which will make data available in one minute periods for an additional cost. The standard monitoring is free, but it takes 5 minutes to deliver data to CloudWatch.
After creating the EC2 instance, you can use the EC2 machine to set up an alarm. First, click ‘Edit’, and then ‘Add alarm’ ...
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