AWS CloudWatch - The Jo Peterson Mix
Keith did CloudWatch a few weeks ago, but Jo did it better.
Editor’s note: Jo Peterson covers all of the security products for us. Keith previously covered CloudWatch from a general perspective. Jo takes the security lens. She’s also a better writer :)
Amazon CloudWatch
by Jo Peterson, VP of Cloud and Security Services at Clarify 360
Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and management service that provides data and actionable insights for AWS, hybrid, and on-premises applications and infrastructure resources.
You can collect and access all your performance and operational data in the form of logs and metrics from a single platform rather than monitoring them in silos (server, network, or database). CloudWatch enables you to monitor your complete stack (applications, infrastructure, network, and services) and use alarms, logs, and events data to take automated actions and reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR). This frees up important resources and allows you to focus on building applications and business value.
CloudWatch gives you actionable insights that help you optimize application performance, manage resource utilization, and understand system-wide operational health.
CloudWatch provides up to one-second visibility of metrics and logs data, 15 months of data retention (metrics), and the ability to perform calculations on metrics. This allows you to perform historical analysis for cost optimization and derive real-time insights into optimizing applications and infrastructure resources.
You can use CloudWatch Container Insights to monitor, troubleshoot, and alert your containerized applications and microservices.
CloudWatch collects, aggregates, and summarizes compute utilization information such as CPU, memory, disk, and network data, as well as diagnostic information such as container restart failures, to help DevOps engineers isolate issues and resolve them quickly.
Container Insights gives you insights from container management services such as Amazon ECS for Kubernetes (EKS), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), AWS Fargate, and standalone Kubernetes (k8s).
4 Uses Cases
Monitor application performance
Visualize performance data, create alarms, and correlate data to understand and resolve the root cause of performance issues in your AWS resources.
Perform root cause analysis
Analyze metrics, logs, logs analytics, and user requests to speed up debugging and reduce overall mean time to resolution.
Optimize resources proactively
Automate resource planning and lower costs by setting actions to occur when thresholds are met based on your specifications or machine learning models.
Test website impacts
Find out exactly when your website is impacted and for how long by viewing screenshots, logs, and web requests at any point in time.