Modern applications are distributed (that is, they run on microservices architectures) and generate lots of data in the form of metrics, logs, and more. You need a way to easily collect, access, and correlate these data points from individual sources in silos (server, network, database, etc.) to effectively monitor applications and infrastructure resources. Amazon CloudWatch enables you to collect metrics and logs from all your AWS resources, applications, and services that run on AWS and on-premises servers, helping you break down data silos so you can easily gain system-wide visibility.

Monitoring your AWS resources is easy with Amazon CloudWatch. CloudWatch is natively integrated with more than 70 AWS services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3, Amazon ECS, AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, etc. that automatically publish detailed 1-minute metrics and custom metrics with up to 1-second granularity. You can use AWS Systems Manager to install a CloudWatch Agent, or you can use the CloudWatch API to easily collect, publish, and store this data in CloudWatch.

Gaining visibility across your distributed stack means correlating and visualizing metrics and logs to quickly pinpoint and resolve issues. With Amazon CloudWatch, you can visualize key metrics like CPU utilization and memory. You can also correlate a log pattern, e.g. error to a specific metric to quickly get the context and go from diagnosing the problem to understanding the root cause. CloudWatch Application Insights surfaces errors and abnormal behaviors in your .NET and SQL Server applications so you can quickly get started with detecting and troubleshooting problems.

Amazon CloudWatch enables you to set high resolution alarms and take automated actions. This means freeing up important resources to focus on adding business value. For example, you can get alerted on Amazon EC2 instances and set up Auto Scaling to add or remove instances. You can also execute automated responses to detect and shut down unused EC2 resources, reducing billing overages and improving resource optimization.

You need a unified operational view, real-time granular data, and historical reference to optimize performance and resource utilization. With Amazon CloudWatch, you get enhanced monitoring with 1-second granularity and up to 15 months of metrics storage and retention. You can also leverage native CloudWatch features, such as Metric Math, to perform calculations on your metric data. For example, you can aggregate usage across an entire fleet of EC2 instances to derive operational and utilization insights.

Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights enables you to explore, analyze, and visualize your logs instantly, allowing you to troubleshoot operational problems with ease. With Logs Insights, you only pay for the queries you run. Logs Insights scales with your log volume and query complexity giving you answers in seconds. In addition, you can publish log-based metrics, create alarms, and correlate logs and metrics together in CloudWatch Dashboards for complete operational visibility.