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AWS CloudWatch

CloudWatch agent

  • CloudWatch provides two categories of monitoring
    • basic monitoring: many services offer basic monitoring without charge
    • detailed monitoring: only offered by some services, it also incurs charges
      • API Gateway, EC2, CloudFront, S3, SES etc.
  • the default metrics collected by CloudWatch are:
    • CPU utilisation: identifies the processing power required to run an application upon a selected instance
    • Network utilisation: identifies the volume of incoming and outgoing network traffic to a single instance
    • Disk Reads: determines the volume of the data the application reads from the hard disk of the instance. This can be used to determine the speed of the application.
  • you can collect extra metrics from servers by installing the CloudWatch agent
    • on EC2 instances, on-premises servers, Linux, Windows Server, macOS
    • metrics includes:
      • Memory utilisation
      • Disk swap utilisation
      • Disk space utilisation
      • Page file utilization
      • Log collection