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People often confuse AWS CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, and VPC flow logs with the many products AWS offers. In this AWS article, we will learn about CloudTrail Vs CloudWatch Vs Flow Logs, comparing the detailed differences between the three.

What is CloudWatch?

Keywords: application, service, network, indicators, monitoring, alarm

Amazon CloudWatch is actually a monitoring system for monitoring your applications, network, and AWS resources. This service allows you to monitor AWS EC2 and other services so that you know about any crashes or outages. And CloudWatch provides a monitoring perspective on application performance to ensure that applications always run smoothly and efficiently.

For monitoring, you can create alerts that monitor metrics by sending notifications or automatically making changes to the resources you monitor when metrics exceed thresholds. Use CloudWatch to detect any problems, set up alerts, visualize logging, automate processing, and get an overall view of your application’s health. The scope of monitoring system includes but is not limited to:

  • Resource usage
  • Application performance
  • Running status

Basic monitoring is free and you can use it to monitor your AWS resources, such as EBS volume EC2 instances, and so on. Monitoring is divided into two types, including:

  • Basic Monitoring, this is a free monitoring service, basic monitoring metrics (frequency is 5 minutes), 10 detailed monitoring metrics (frequency is 1 minute) and 1 million API requests, 5GB data log, three monitoring dashboards and more.
  • Detailed monitoring, a fee-based monitoring service that displays the monitoring charts of instances at 1-minute intervals. The service is charged on a monthly basis based on specific usage details.

What are the benefits?

Overall, real-time awareness has further improved operating costs and greatly improved the ability to monitor AWS resources.

So how does it work?

Amazon CloudWatch is essentially a metrics repository. AWS services, such as Amazon EC2, place metrics in a repository against which you can retrieve statistics. If you put your own custom metrics in the repository, you can also retrieve statistics about those metrics.

You can use metrics in the CloudWatch console to compute statistics and then display the data graphically. You can configure alarm actions to stop, start, or terminate an Amazon EC2 instance, and so on, when certain conditions are met.

AWS Log Monitoring CloudTrail Vs CloudWatch