CloudWatch
- CloudWatch is a monitoring service to monitor all resources & application running on AWS.
- CloudWatch is primarily used to monitor performance, including but not limited to:
- Compute: EC2 instances, ASG, ELB, Route53 health checks;
- Storage: EBS, storage gateway;
- Content delivery: CloudFront.
- CloudWatch include host-level metrics such as CPU, network, disk and status check.
- CloudWatch is different from CloudTrial or AWS Config:
- CloudWatch: can be used as an application log service;
- CloudTrail: an audit log service that records down all API calls to any AWS resource;
- AWS Config: set configurations rules that your AWS resources need to comply with, and records down the changes to the configurations of any AWS resource in an S3 bucket.
- CloudWatch will monitor events related to EC2 instances every 5 minutes by default.
- By turning on detailed monitoring (with an additional charge), this can be changed to every 1 minute.
- CloudWatch alarms can be created to send notifications.
- You can create a billing alert in CloudWatch.
- CloudWatch stores historical statistics for a period of 15 months.
AWS CLI
- AWS CLI achieves almost the same set of functionalities as the AWS management console.
- AWS CLI access need to be set up through IAM.