Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications you run on AWS.

You can use Amazon CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, set alarms, and automatically react to changes in your AWS resources.

It helps monitoring of the infrastructure. monitor and alert in case of identified issues within the infrastructure. It is the service provided by AWS itself for monitoring and alerting of infrastructure on cloud.

Usecase : A customer has a requirement to monitor its cloud infrastructure, they are looking for specific requirements such as server monitoring, server and service log monitoring solution.

The best suitable solution for such usecase is 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.

It is accessible via API, command-line tools, the AWS SDK, and the AWS Management Console. It is supported by services like EC2, EBS,Autoscaling etc. For full list of supported services visit this link.

Features :

• Monitor Custom Metrics – Monitoring Memory and Disk Metrics for Amazon EC2 Linux Instances. For detailed information visit : http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/DeveloperGuide/publishingMetrics.html

• Monitor and Store Logs – CloudWatch Logs lets you monitor and troubleshoot your systems and applications using your existing system, application, and custom log files. For detailed information visit : http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/DeveloperGuide/WhatIsCloudWatchLogs.html.

• Set Alarms – Set alarms on any of your metrics to receive notifications or take other automated actions when your metric crosses your specified threshold. You can use alarms to detect and shut down Amazon EC2 instances that are unused or underutilized. The notifications are sent via two mode email and sms.

• View Graphs and Statistics : 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 two weeks enabling you to view up to the minute data and also historical data.

• Monitor and React to Resource Changes : It 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.

Pricing (Singapore Region)

Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards

• $3.00 per dashboard per month

Detailed Monitoring for Amazon EC2 Instances

• $3.50 per instance per month for Detailed Monitoring at 1-minute frequency

Amazon CloudWatch Custom Metrics

• $0.50 per metric per month

Amazon CloudWatch Alarms

• $0.10 per alarm per month

Amazon CloudWatch API Requests

• $0.01 per 1,000 GetMetricStatistics, ListMetrics, or PutMetricData requests

Amazon CloudWatch Logs*

• $0.70 per GB ingested**
• $0.03 per GB archived per month***
• Data Transfer OUT from CloudWatch Logs is priced equivalent to the “Data Transfer OUT from Amazon EC2 To” and “Data Transfer OUT from Amazon EC2 to Internet” tables on the EC2 Pricing Page.

Overall Amazon CloudWatch is easy and it provides wide range of functionalities which makes it a great service to have.

For more info visit  : https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/