CloudWatch

CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service provided by Amazon Web Services. It helps you track the health, performance, and behavior of applications and infrastructure running on AWS by collecting metrics, logs, and events.

What CloudWatch Does in Simple Terms

CloudWatch acts like a monitoring dashboard for your AWS resources.

It watches what is happening in your systems and answers questions like:

• Is my server healthy
• Is my application slow
• Are errors increasing
• Is something about to fail

When something goes wrong, CloudWatch can alert you automatically.

Key Components of CloudWatch

Metrics

Metrics are numerical measurements collected over time.

Examples include:

• CPU usage
• Memory usage
• Disk activity
• Network traffic

Metrics help you understand how your resources are performing.

Logs

CloudWatch Logs store and analyze log data from applications and services.

Examples:

• Application error logs
• Web server access logs
• System logs

Logs make it easier to troubleshoot problems and investigate incidents.

Alarms

Alarms watch metrics and trigger actions when thresholds are crossed.

For example:

• Send an alert if CPU usage goes above 80 percent
• Scale resources when traffic increases

Events

CloudWatch Events, now part of EventBridge, detect changes in your AWS environment and trigger automated responses.

Common Use Cases

• Monitoring servers and applications
• Detecting outages and performance issues
• Triggering alerts and automated actions
• Scaling infrastructure based on demand

Why CloudWatch Is Important

Visibility
Provides real time insight into AWS systems

Automation
Enables automatic responses to issues

Reliability
Helps prevent downtime and performance degradation

Cost awareness
Identifies underused or overloaded resources

In Short

CloudWatch is AWS’s built in monitoring service that helps teams observe, alert on, and respond to what is happening inside their cloud infrastructure.

CloudWatch is an AWS monitoring service that collects metrics, logs, and events to help teams track system health, detect issues, and automate responses in cloud environments.