Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch provides a reliable, scalable, and flexible monitoring solution that you can start using within minutes. You no longer need to set up, manage, and scale your own monitoring systems and infrastructure.  Amazon CloudWatch enables you to monitor your AWS resources in near real-time, including Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EBS volumes, Elastic Load Balancers, and Amazon RDS DB instances. Metrics such as CPU utilization, latency, and request counts are provided automatically for these AWS resources. You can also supply your own logs or custom application and system metrics, such as memory usage, transaction volumes, or error rates, and Amazon CloudWatch will monitor these too.  With Amazon CloudWatch, you can access up-to-the-minute statistics, view graphs, and set alarms for your metric data to help you troubleshoot, spot trends, and take automated action based on the state of your cloud environment. Amazon CloudWatch functionality is accessible via API, command-line tools, the AWS SDK, and the AWS Management Console. Monitor Amazon EC2 Monitor EC2 instances automatically, without installing additional software: Basic Monitoring for Amazon EC2 instances: Seven pre-selected metrics at five-minute frequency and three status check metrics at one-minute frequency, for no additional charge. Detailed Monitoring for Amazon EC2 instances: All metrics available to Basic Monitoring at one-minute frequency, for an additional charge. Instances with Detailed Monitoring enabled allows data aggregation by Amazon EC2 AMI ID and instance type. If you use Auto Scaling or Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon CloudWatch will also provide Amazon EC2 instance metrics aggregated by Auto Scaling group and by Elastic Load Balancer, regardless of whether you have chosen Basic or Detailed Monitoring. Monitoring data is retained for fifteen months, even if your AWS resources have been terminated. This enables you to quickly look back at the metrics preceding an event of interest to you. Basic Monitoring is already enabled automatically for all Amazon EC2 instances, and you can access these metrics in either the Amazon EC2 tab or the Amazon CloudWatch tab of the AWS Management Console, or by using the Amazon CloudWatch API. Monitor Other AWS Resources Amazon CloudWatch automatically monitors Elastic Load Balancers for metrics such as request count and latency; Amazon EBS volumes for metrics such as read/write latency; Amazon RDS DB instances for metrics such as freeable memory and available storage space; Amazon SQS queues for metrics such as number of messages sent and received; and Amazon SNS topics for metrics such as number of messages published and delivered. No additional software needs to be installed to monitor other AWS resources.

• Auto Scaling groups: seven pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, optional and for no additional charge.
• Elastic Load Balancers: thirteen pre-selected metrics at one-minute frequency, for no additional charge.
• Amazon Route 53 health checks: One pre-selected metric at one-minute frequency, for no additional charge.

Monitor Custom Metrics Submit Custom Metrics generated by your own applications (or by AWS resources not mentioned above) and have them monitored by Amazon CloudWatch. You can submit these metrics to Amazon CloudWatch via a simple API request. All the same Amazon CloudWatch functionality will be available at up to one-minute frequency for your own custom metric data, including statistics, graphs, and alarms.  Monitor and Store Logs CloudWatch Logs lets you monitor and troubleshoot your systems and applications using your existing system, application, and custom log files. With CloudWatch Logs, you can monitor your logs, in near real-time, for specific phrases, values or patterns (metrics). For example, you could set an alarm on the number of errors that occur in your system logs or view graphs of web request latencies from your application logs. You can view the original log data to see the source of the problem if needed. Log data can be stored and accessed for as long as you need using highly durable, low-cost storage so you don’t have to worry about filling up hard drives. View Graphs and Statistics With Amazon CloudWatch dashboards, you can create re-usable dashboards which allow you to monitor your AWS resources in one location. Metric data is kept for a period of fifteen months enabling you to view up to the minute data and also historical data. Monitor and React to Resource Changes Amazon CloudWatch Events enables you to respond quickly to application availability issues or resource changes, with notifications from AWS services delivered in near-real-time. You simply write rules to indicate which events are of interest to your application and what automated action to take when a rule matches an event. You can, for example, invoke AWS Lambda functions or notify an Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic. You can also emit events on a schedule.