As you are probably aware, Amazon CloudWatch is the main monitoring service used in AWS and collects data and metrics from all the supported AWS services. This allows you to gain a better understanding of the performance of your environment. In addition to the built-in CloudWatch metrics, CloudWatch also allows you to collect valuable logging information from many different AWS services, such as EC2 instances, Route 53, and CloudTrail.
Using CloudWatch Logs as a central repository enables you to view real-time logging information from your services, which can be filtered and queried to search for specific events or error codes that you want to be made aware of, allowing you to respond accordingly.
In this section of the chapter, I want to explain how you can use the CloudWatch logging agent on your EC2 instances to enable you to send log data generated from your EC2 instances or any applications that may be running on your instance. This log data is...