Chapter 7. Monitoring with CloudWatch

CloudWatch is an AWS service that can be used on the AWS cloud for monitoring various infrastructure and application resources running on your AWS cloud. CloudWatch can be used to collect a number of metrics from the AWS resources. It allows you to track these metrics and also initiate actions based on the threshold you set. CloudWatch can also collect log files, generate metrics out of them, and help to monitor log files. You can set alarms on specific events and trigger an action whenever an event occurs. For example, if CPU utilization for a specific instance crosses a threshold of 80%, you can initiate an action to spin up a new instance.

CloudWatch supports the monitoring of many AWS services such as EC2 instances, DynamoDB, RDS, and so on. You can also generate custom metrics and log files using your own applications and associate them with CloudWatch. Amazon services like Auto Scaling uses CloudWatch alarms to automatically scale an environment...