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