Amazon CloudWatch enables the monitoring of Amazon services, standard and custom defined metrics, and a variety of logs. Typically, you would want to retrieve metrics for analysis and/or integration with other monitoring tools. For example, you can use AWS Trusted Advisor to analyze your AWS configuration and usage, compare it to the best practices, and to alert you to opportunities to save on costs, help close security gaps, or improve system reliability and performance. CloudWatch provides APIs for retrieving hundreds of metrics by namespace, start and finish times, intervals, and so on.
CloudWatch logs can be monitored for errors, exceptions, HTTP response codes, Amazon S3 logs, and so on. In addition, you can also use the logs to correlate the system status with change events such as when AWS CloudFormation is used to rollout a new stack. We...