Getting to know Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch is a service designed by AWS. It is an all-encompassing and complete end-to-end monitoring solution, used for monitoring applications, servers, serverless applications, on-premises systems, cloud-native applications, storage services, networking services database services, and many more. CloudWatch has the ability to collect and store logs of applications deployed in any environment. You do not have to worry about any servers to set up, configure, or manage for your logs' storage and management. CloudWatch stores petabytes of logs that for AWS users. It is embedded with tools that make it easy to loop through and interpret log data that has been collected.
CloudWatch does not only store logs, it also has its own CloudWatch dashboard, which is used to draw different types of mathematical graphs used for data interpretation. With its built-in CloudWatch Events, which is gradually being migrated into Amazon EventBridge, it is able to respond to events based on specific conditions, and those events can further trigger other specific operations that have been configured with it. CloudWatch Event rules can be configured to trigger a specific CloudWatch Event to occur. A simple example could be configuring the CloudWatch Event to shut down an EC2 instance by 7 p.m. when the business closes down, and start it up by 7 a.m. when everyone is back at work.
Important Note
A CloudWatch Event rule is a functionality that is part of Amazon CloudWatch, which is used to schedule the time an operation should be performed. It is usually associated with Amazon CloudWatch Events.
One very important feature of every monitoring tool is also in CloudWatch, which is alerts. CloudWatch has a rich alerting system that works in connection with Amazon SNS. Alerts can be configured to trigger based on specific metrics identified in logs received into CloudWatch. Mathematical symbols can be used to configure granular metrics and specific time intervals to determine when an alert will be sent and for what particular reason that particular alert was sent. In some cases, the alerts can be used as the first point of call to solve the issue that has been identified, one of which is rebooting an EC2 instance that refused to start up for any reason.
CloudWatch also has a feature called Synthetics, which makes it possible for CloudWatch to send intermittent pings to an endpoint, a website, an API, or a web application to check for the status and when it is down, and it can send a notification. This means that CloudWatch can be used for both proactive and reactive monitoring.
This book will show how to set up, configure, and manage different types of infrastructure from the monitoring perspective. From Chapter 3, CloudWatch Logs, Metrics and Dashboard, through to Chapter 9, Monitoring Storage Services with Amazon CloudWatch, we will be configuring the monitoring of different AWS services and resources. This will be after a brief introduction to the service and its components.
