Management and Governance
CoreAmazon CloudWatch Logs
Central application and service logs for automation, query, and investigation.
Key points
- CloudWatch Logs centralizes application and service log events from ephemeral pipeline components.
- Structure, correlation identifiers, retention, access, and secret filtering determine whether the logs are useful and safe.
Best-known use cases
- Centralize logs from data jobs and serverless pipeline components.
- Query failures with Logs Insights or stream logs to downstream processors.
What candidates often confuse it with
- CloudWatch Logs stores and queries log events; CloudTrail is the API audit source and S3 can retain long-term archives.
Key takeaway
Choose CloudWatch Logs for centralized diagnostic detail that must survive worker termination.
Relevant exam tasks
- D3.3 — Task 3.3: Maintain and monitor data pipelines
- 3.3.7 — Use Amazon CloudWatch Logs to log application data (with a focus on configuration and automation).
- 3.3.8 — Analyze logs with AWS services (for example, Athena, Amazon EMR, Amazon OpenSearch Service, CloudWatch Logs Insights, big data application logs).
- D4.4 — Task 4.4: Prepare logs for audit
- 4.4.2 — Use Amazon CloudWatch Logs to store application logs.