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CloudWatch Basics

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Amazon CloudWatch monitors

  • AWS resources
  • applications running on AWS

CloudWatch

  • collects and tracks metrics, for AWS resources and applications.
  • CloudWatch home page displays metrics about every AWS service in use.
  • Can create custom dashboards to display metrics
  • Alarms can be configured to monitor metrics and send notifications, if needed
  • Alarms can automatically make changes to the resources under monitoring against a threshold

Access CloudWatch by

CloudWatch Namespaces

A cloudwatch namespace is

  • It is a container for CloudWatch metrics.
  • Metrics are isolated if they are in different namespaces
  • There is no default namespace.
  • Must specify a namespace for each data point to be published to CloudWatch.
  • While creating a metric, provide namespace name.
  • These names must contain valid XML characters,
  • Be fewer than 256 characters in length.
  • Possible characters are: alphanumeric characters (0-9A-Za-z), period (.), hyphen (-), underscore (_), forward slash (/), hash (#), and colon (:).
  • The AWS namespaces, naming convention: AWS/service

CloudWatch Dimensions

A dimension

  • is a name/value pair
  • part of the identity of a metric.
  • a metric can be given a maximum of 10 dimensions
  • Used to describe characteristic of a metric
  • Also used to filter the results that CloudWatch returns
  • For few AWS services like EC2, CloudWatch can aggregate data across dimensions
  • Example – Server=Producton,Domain=City01

CloudWatch Statistics

  • It is metric data aggregations over specified periods of time.
  • Aggregations use the namespace, metric name, dimensions, and the data point unit of measure, within the specified time period.

Available statistics

  • Minimum  – lowest value observed during a period. indicates, when low activity
  • Maximum – highest value observed during a period. indicates, when high activity
  • Sum – Add all values submitted for matching metric indicates, total activity
  • Average – The value of Sum / SampleCount during a period.
  • SampleCount  – The count (number) of data points used for statistical calculation.
  • pNN.NN  – Value of specified percentile up to 2 decimal places like p95.45. Not for negative value metrics.
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