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CloudWatch agent

The unified CloudWatch agent enables you to do the following:

Collect internal system-level metrics from Amazon EC2 instances across operating systems. The metrics can include in-guest metrics, in addition to the metrics for EC2 instances. The additional metrics that can be collected are listed in

Metrics collected by the CloudWatch agent⁠

Metrics: cpu_time_*, cpu_usage_*, disk_free/total/used, disk_inode_*, diskio_*, ethtool_*, mem_inactive/free/available/used*, netstat_*, processes_*, swap_free/used/used_percentage

Collect system-level metrics from on-premises servers. These can include servers in a hybrid environment as well as servers not managed by AWS.

Retrieve custom metrics from your applications or services using the StatsD and collectd protocols.

StatsD is supported on both Linux servers and servers running Windows Server.

collectd is supported only on Linux servers.

Collect logs from Amazon EC2 instances and on-premises servers, running either Linux or Windows Server.

Note

The CloudWatch agent does not support collecting logs from FIFO pipes.

Version 1.300031.0 and later can be used to enable CloudWatch Application Signals. For more information, see

Application Signals⁠

Version 1.300025.0 and later can collect traces from

OpenTelemetry⁠

X-Ray⁠

client SDKs, and send them to X-Ray.

Using the CloudWatch agent allows you to collect traces without needing to run a separate trace collection daemon, helping to reduce the number of agents that you run and manage.

You can store and view the metrics that you collect with the CloudWatch agent in CloudWatch just as you can with any other CloudWatch metrics. The default namespace for metrics collected by the CloudWatch agent is CWAgent, although you can specify a different namespace when you configure the agent.

The logs collected by the unified CloudWatch agent are processed and stored in Amazon CloudWatch Logs, just like logs collected by the older CloudWatch Logs agent.

Metrics collected by the CloudWatch agent are billed as custom metrics.

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Metrics collected by the CloudWatch agent

You can collect metrics from servers by installing the CloudWatch agent on the server. You can install the agent on both Amazon EC2 instances and on-premises servers, and on computers running either Linux, Windows Server, or macOS. If you install the agent on an Amazon EC2 instance, the metrics it collects are in addition to the metrics enabled by default on Amazon EC2 instances.

Metrics collected by the CloudWatch agent on Windows Server instances

On a server running Windows Server, installing the CloudWatch agent enables you to collect the metrics associated with the counters in Windows Performance Monitor. The CloudWatch metric names for these counters are created by putting a space between the object name and the counter name. For example, the % Interrupt Time counter of the Processor object is given the metric name Processor % Interrupt Time in CloudWatch. For more information about Windows Performance Monitor counters, see the Microsoft Windows Server documentation.

The default namespace for metrics collected by the CloudWatch agent is CWAgent, although you can specify a different namespace when you configure the agent.