Amazon CloudWatch | General Flashcards
What is Amazon CloudWatch?
General
Amazon CloudWatch | Management Tools
Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications you run on AWS. You can use Amazon CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, and set alarms. Amazon CloudWatch can monitor AWS resources such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon DynamoDB tables, and Amazon RDS DB instances, as well as custom metrics generated by your applications and services, and any log files your applications generate. You can use Amazon CloudWatch to gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health. You can use these insights to react and keep your application running smoothly.
What can I use to access CloudWatch?
General
Amazon CloudWatch | Management Tools
Amazon CloudWatch can be accessed via API, command-line interface, AWS SDKs, and the AWS Management Console.
Which operating systems does Amazon CloudWatch support?
General
Amazon CloudWatch | Management Tools
Amazon CloudWatch receives and provides metrics for all Amazon EC2 instances and should work with any operating system currently supported by the Amazon EC2 service.
What access management policies can I implement for CloudWatch?
General
Amazon CloudWatch | Management Tools
Amazon CloudWatch integrates with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) so that you can specify which CloudWatch actions a user in your AWS Account can perform. For example, you could create an IAM policy that gives only certain users in your organization permission to use GetMetricStatistics. They could then use the action to retrieve data about your cloud resources.
You can’t use IAM to control access to CloudWatch data for specific resources. For example, you can’t give a user access to CloudWatch data for only a specific set of instances or a specific LoadBalancer. Permissions granted using IAM cover all the cloud resources you use with CloudWatch. In addition, you can’t use IAM roles with the Amazon CloudWatch command line tools.
What is Amazon CloudWatch Logs?
General
Amazon CloudWatch | Management Tools
Amazon CloudWatch Logs lets you monitor and troubleshoot your systems and applications using your existing system, application and custom log files.
With CloudWatch Logs, you can monitor your logs, in near real time, for specific phrases, values or patterns. For example, you could set an alarm on the number of errors that occur in your system logs or view graphs of latency of web requests from your application logs. You can then view the original log data to see the source of the problem. Log data can be stored and accessed indefinitely in highly durable, low-cost storage so you don’t have to worry about filling up hard drives.
What kinds of things can I do with CloudWatch Logs?
General
Amazon CloudWatch | Management Tools
CloudWatch Logs is capable of monitoring and storing your logs to help you better understand and operate your systems and applications. You can use CloudWatch Logs in a number of ways.
Real time application and system monitoring: You can use CloudWatch Logs to monitor applications and systems using log data. For example, CloudWatch Logs can track the number of errors that occur in your application logs and send you a notification whenever the rate of errors exceeds a threshold you specify. CloudWatch Logs uses your log data for monitoring; so, no code changes are required.
Long term log retention: You can use CloudWatch Logs to store your log data indefinitely in highly durable and cost effective storage without worrying about hard drives running out of space. The CloudWatch Logs Agent makes it easy to quickly move both rotated and non rotated log files off of a host and into the log service. You can then access the raw log event data when you need it.
What platforms does the CloudWatch Logs Agent support?
General
Amazon CloudWatch | Management Tools
The CloudWatch Logs Agent is supported on Amazon Linux, Ubuntu, CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Windows. This agent will support the ability to monitor individual log files on the host.
