Amazon CloudWatch

What This Service Solves

CloudWatch is the operational telemetry service for metrics, logs, alarms, dashboards, events, and observability signals.

• Use CloudWatch to monitor resource metrics, collect logs, create alarms, drive operational notifications, and troubleshoot application behavior.

When You Should Not Use It

• Do not use CloudWatch as an audit trail for who called AWS APIs. That is CloudTrail.

What AWS Manages and What You Manage

AWS provides telemetry collection and query services. You manage what to emit, retention, alarms, dashboards, and response actions.

Security Implications

Protect logs because they can contain sensitive data. Use retention, KMS where needed, and scoped access.

Availability and Scaling

CloudWatch helps detect issues; it is not the fix by itself. Pair alarms with response runbooks.

Custom metrics, high-cardinality dimensions, and high-volume logs can grow fast. Design labels carefully.

Cost Behavior

Logs ingestion, retention, custom metrics, dashboards, and alarms create recurring cost.

Common Integrations

• EC2
• Lambda
• RDS
• ECS
• EventBridge
• SNS

How AWS Might Present It

Certification-Specific Depth

Related Comparisons

Sources and Review Metadata

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