Are you facing difficulty in monitoring the performance of your brand new cloud app or micro-services?
Monitoring is essential to ensure that all the services deployed through the cloud are running smoothly with excellent efficiency.
This is where Amazon CloudWatch helps you to keep things on track. Let us dive into the details about Amazon CloudWatch.
What is Amazon CloudWatch?
Amazon CloudWatch is a service built for DevOps engineers, IT managers, and developers. It provides reliable data and insights by monitoring the applications and their performance, resource utilization, and more. CloudWatch collects the operational data in the form of logs, events, and metrics. It provides a unified view of AWS resources, services, and applications running on AWS and on-premises servers.
Amazon CloudWatch features
Logging and metrics are the two primary services that Amazon CloudWatch offers.
Logging service provides the storing, viewing, capturing, monitoring, and managing of service and application logs. The metrics services include management and capturing of the overall performance of the resource and operational metrics.
Features:
CloudWatch Logs
It enables the users to collect and store the customer’s logs for the AWS services like AWS CloudTrail, Lambda, API Gateway, Simple Notification Service, and other on-premises applications. The insights from the CloudWatch logs help in quick queries and log data visualization.
Collection of metrics
Users can collect the default metrics from more than 70 distributed AWS applications and watch them from a single location. It also helps in organizing the metrics and customizes the logs from applications or on-premises resources.
Insights on containers
This feature collects and aggregates the metrics and logs for the containerized applications as well as the microservices. It also helps in troubleshooting the Amazon Elastic Kubernetes services and orchestration services.
Unified view and composite alarms
It enables users to create the dashboard views for the selected graphs, applications, and the other visualized cloud data. The composite alarms unify for different issues that are affected by the same application from one notification. It helps in root cause diagnosis.
ServiceLens, Synthetics and Metric Streams
The service monitors the overall performance and availability of applications. It helps resolve the bottlenecks and recognizes the affected users by diagnosing the root cause of the issue. The synthetics monitor the application endpoints and alert the user to avoid abnormal infrastructure issues. The Metric Streams enable the users to create real-time metric streams to applications like Amazon S3.
Insights for .NET and SQL server
This feature helps in monitoring the server applications using automated dashboards and intelligent metrics. It also correlates the specific patterns that are in logs with metrics for root cause diagnosis.
Advantages of Amazon CloudWatch
· CloudWatch offers many benefits for organizations using AWS resources and applications.
· Provides easy access to the basic functionalities
· Improves the visibility for all the AWS monitoring data on a single interface
· Collects the metrics for AWS environments effectively
· Improves and optimizes the operational performance of AWS and on-premises resources.
· It gives you detailed insights into the correlations and other relationships in a system performance
· Improves the stability and reliability
· Seamlessly integrates with other AWS resources.
Disadvantages
Slightly expensive compared to other third-party monitoring and log tools
Didn’t give access to the AWS resources in smaller units that are of one-minute intervals
Pricing
CloudWatch is available in free and paid subscriptions. The free version covers the limited monitoring metrics, API requests, dashboards, log data, events, and other insights. It offers a pay as you go pricing structure where it is billed monthly. The pricing depends on the metrics quantity, APIs, and metrics that are used.
See the AWS CloudWatch pricing page for a comprehensive breakdown with a pricing calculator and pricing examples.
Conclusion
Do you want to explore what all you can do with Quickwork and Amazon CloudWatch together? Checkout the integration and automation possibilities with us.
