An overview of Amazon CloudWatch

Before we move on to Amazon CloudWatch, it is important to understand the difference in a traditional monitoring solution and a monitoring solution based on the clouds. Unlike your traditional environments, infrastructure in the cloud can scale up and down dynamically in a matter of minutes. Most traditional server monitoring tools cannot match up to this elastic requirement in real time and thus often end up either providing the wrong information or triggering a delayed response. There is also the problem of sheer numbers! A standalone monitoring tool can find it difficult to handle the monitoring of thousands of virtual machines at a single go. Plus, you as sysadmins also need to manage the monitoring tool, which adds an extra overhead as well. That's where a cloud-based monitoring solution is so different. A standard cloud-based monitoring tool provides the following feature sets:

• Ease of use and management: Most of the cloud-based monitoring tools come...