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13. Monitoring, Logging & Auditing
Amazon Cloudwatch
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Amazon CloudWatch monitors your Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources and the applications you run on AWS in real time. You can use CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, which are variables you can measure for your resources and applications.
The CloudWatch home page automatically displays metrics about every AWS service you use. You can additionally create custom dashboards to display metrics about your custom applications, and display custom collections of metrics that you choose.
You can create alarms that watch metrics and send notifications or automatically make changes to the resources you are monitoring when a threshold is breached. For example, you can monitor the CPU usage and disk reads and writes of your Amazon EC2 instances and then use that data to determine whether you should launch additional instances to handle increased load. You can also use this data to stop under-used instances to save money.
With CloudWatch, you gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health.

Amazon CloudWatch is basically a metrics repository. An AWS service—such as Amazon EC2—puts metrics into the repository, and you retrieve statistics based on those metrics. If you put your own custom metrics into the repository, you can retrieve statistics on these metrics as well.
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You can use metrics to calculate statistics and then present the data graphically in the CloudWatch console. For more information about the other AWS resources that generate and send metrics to CloudWatch, see
AWS services that publish CloudWatch metrics
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You can configure alarm actions to stop, start, or terminate an Amazon EC2 instance when certain criteria are met. In addition, you can create alarms that initiate Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) actions on your behalf.
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CloudWatch metrics

Metrics are data about the performance of your systems. By default, many services provide free metrics for resources (such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EBS volumes, and Amazon RDS DB instances). You can also enable detailed monitoring for some resources, such as your Amazon EC2 instances, or publish your own application metrics. Amazon CloudWatch can load all the metrics in your account (both AWS resource metrics and application metrics that you provide) for search, graphing, and alarms.
Metric data is kept for 15 months, enabling you to view both up-to-the-minute data and historical data.
CloudWatch provides two categories of monitoring: basic monitoring and detailed monitoring.
Many AWS services offer basic monitoring by publishing a default set of metrics to CloudWatch with no charge to customers. By default, when you start using one of these AWS services, basic monitoring is automatically enabled.
Detailed monitoring is offered by only some services. It also incurs charges. To use it for an AWS service, you must choose to activate it. Detailed monitoring options differ based on the services that offer it. For example, Amazon EC2 detailed monitoring provides more frequent metrics, published at one-minute intervals, instead of the five-minute intervals used in Amazon EC2 basic monitoring. Detailed monitoring for Amazon S3 and Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka means more fine-grained metrics.
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Publish custom metrics

You can publish your own metrics to CloudWatch using the AWS CLI or an API. You can view statistical graphs of your published metrics with the AWS Management Console.
CloudWatch stores data about a metric as a series of data points. Each data point has an associated time stamp. You can even publish an aggregated set of data points called a statistic set.
Each metric is one of the following:
Standard resolution, with data having a one-minute granularity
High resolution, with data at a granularity of one second
Metrics produced by AWS services are standard resolution by default. When you publish a custom metric, you can define it as either standard resolution or high resolution. When you publish a high-resolution metric, CloudWatch stores it with a resolution of 1 second, and you can read and retrieve it with a period of 1 second, 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 30 seconds, or any multiple of 60 seconds.
High-resolution metrics can give you more immediate insight into your application's sub-minute activity. Keep in mind that every PutMetricData call for a custom metric is charged, so calling PutMetricData more often on a high-resolution metric can lead to higher charges.
If you set an alarm on a high-resolution metric, you can specify a high-resolution alarm with a period of 10 seconds or 30 seconds, or you can set a regular alarm with a period of any multiple of 60 seconds. There is a higher charge for high-resolution alarms with a period of 10 or 30 seconds.
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CloudWatch dashboards

Amazon CloudWatch dashboards are customizable home pages in the CloudWatch console that you can use to monitor your resources in a single view, even those resources that are spread across different Regions. You can use CloudWatch dashboards to create customized views of the metrics and alarms for your AWS resources.
With dashboards, you can create the following:
A single view for selected metrics and alarms to help you assess the health of your resources and applications across one or more Regions. You can select the color used for each metric on each graph, so that you can easily track the same metric across multiple graphs.
An operational playbook that provides guidance for team members during operational events about how to respond to specific incidents.
A common view of critical resource and application measurements that can be shared by team members for faster communication flow during operational events.
If you have multiple AWS accounts, you can set up CloudWatch cross-account observability and then create rich cross-account dashboards in your monitoring accounts. These dashboards can include graphs of metrics from source accounts and CloudWatch Logs Insights widgets with queries of log groups from source accounts. Additionally, alarms that you create in the monitoring account can watch metrics in source accounts.

Sharing CloudWatch dashboards

You can share your CloudWatch dashboards with people who do not have direct access to your AWS account. This enables you to share dashboards across teams, with stakeholders, and with people external to your organization. You can even display dashboards on big screens in team areas, or embed them in Wikis and other webpages.
When you share dashboards, you can designate who can view the dashboard in three ways:
Share a single dashboard and designate as many as five email addresses of people who can view the dashboard. Each of these users creates their own password that they must enter to view the dashboard.
Share a single dashboard publicly, so that anyone who has the link can view the dashboard.
Share all the CloudWatch dashboards in your account and specify a third-party single sign-on (SSO) provider for dashboard access. All users who are members of this SSO provider's list can access all the dashboards in the account. To enable this, you integrate the SSO provider with Amazon Cognito. The SSO provider must support Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). For more information about Amazon Cognito, see
What is Amazon Cognito?
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Sharing a dashboard doesn't incur charges, but widgets inside a shared dashboard incur charges at standard CloudWatch rates.
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CloudWatch alarms

You can create metric and composite alarms in Amazon CloudWatch.
A metric alarm watches a single CloudWatch metric or the result of a math expression based on CloudWatch metrics. The alarm performs one or more actions based on the value of the metric or expression relative to a threshold over a number of time periods. The action can be sending a notification to an Amazon SNS topic, performing an Amazon EC2 action or an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling action, or creating an OpsItem or incident in Systems Manager.
A composite alarm includes a rule expression that takes into account the alarm states of other alarms that you have created. The composite alarm goes into ALARM state only if all conditions of the rule are met. The alarms specified in a composite alarm's rule expression can include metric alarms and other composite alarms.
Using composite alarms can reduce alarm noise. You can create multiple metric alarms, and also create a composite alarm and set up alerts only for the composite alarm. For example, a composite might go into ALARM state only when all of the underlying metric alarms are in ALARM state.
Composite alarms can send Amazon SNS notifications when they change state, and can create Systems Manager OpsItems or incidents when they go into ALARM state, but can't perform EC2 actions or Auto Scaling actions.
You can add alarms to dashboards, so you can monitor and receive alerts about your AWS resources and applications across multiple regions. After you add an alarm to a dashboard, the alarm turns gray when it's in the INSUFFICIENT_DATA state and red when it's in the ALARM state. The alarm is shown with no color when it's in the OK state.

Metric alarm states

A metric alarm has the following possible states:
OK – The metric or expression is within the defined threshold.
ALARM – The metric or expression is outside of the defined threshold.
INSUFFICIENT_DATA – The alarm has just started, the metric is not available, or not enough data is available for the metric to determine the alarm state.
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List the available CloudWatch metrics for your instances - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
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CloudWatch metrics
Publish custom metrics
CloudWatch dashboards
Sharing CloudWatch dashboards
CloudWatch alarms
Metric alarm states
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