Management and Governance
CoreAmazon CloudWatch
Monitoring and observability service for metrics, logs, alarms, dashboards, and related application and AWS resource telemetry.
Key points
- Metrics show aggregate time series; logs hold event details; dashboards present selected signals; alarms evaluate conditions.
- Logs Insights queries structured log fields and time ranges.
- Embedded metric format can extract declared custom metrics from structured logs.
Best-known use cases
- Monitor latency, errors, throughput, saturation, and business outcomes.
- Query application logs and alert responders to actionable conditions.
What candidates often confuse it with
- CloudWatch logs and metrics complement X-Ray distributed traces.
- A dashboard visualizes signals; an alarm evaluates a condition and can trigger a notification.
Key takeaway
Use CloudWatch to emit, query, visualize, and alert on complementary application signals.
Related services
- AWS X-Ray
- AWS Lambda
- Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS)
Relevant exam tasks
- D4.1 — Assist in a root cause analysis
- 4.1.2 — Interpret application metrics, logs, and traces
- 4.1.3 — Query logs to find relevant data
- 4.1.4 — Implement custom metrics (for example, Amazon CloudWatch embedded metric format [EMF])
- 4.1.5 — Review application health by using dashboards and insights
- D4.2 — Instrument code for observability
- 4.2.2 — Implement an effective logging strategy to record application behavior and state
- 4.2.3 — Implement code that emits custom metrics
- 4.2.5 — Implement notification alerts for specific actions (for example, notifications about quota limits or deployment completions)
- 4.2.7 — Implement structured logging for application events and user actions