Notes on: AWS Essentials: 8) CloudWatch

Just a place to put some notes on the “AWS Essentials” course from https://linuxacademy.com

8) CloudWatch
8.1) CloudWatch Basics

Amazon CloudWatch monitors your AWS resources and the applications you run on AWS, in real time. You can use Cloudwatch to collect and track metrics.
CloudWatch alarms send notifications* or automatically make changes to resources based on rules that you define.
*Trigger an SNS topic.

CloudWatch monitoring examples (view in Dashboards):
- EC2: CPU Utilization, Status Checks, Disk Read/Writes
- S3: Number of Objects, Bucket Size
- Billing

Image: AWS Console > Services > Management Tools: CloudWatch

Pricing/Cost Overview:
Free Tier use is available for CloudWatch.
Charged (prices may vary depending on Region):
(1) Per Dashboard
(2) Detailed Monitoring for Amazon EC2 Instances
(3) Amazon CloudWatch Custom Metrics
(4) CloudWatch API Request
(5) CloudWatch Logs
(6) CloudWatch Events/Custom Events

8.2) CloudWatch Metrics and Alarms

Creating Dashboard

Step 1: Click ‘Create dashboard

Image: Services > CloudWatch > Dashboards: Create dashboard

Step 2: Give the dashboard a name
Step 3: Add a widget to the dashboard

Image: Add (widget) to this dashboard

Step 4: Add a metric to the widget
Step 5: Click ‘Create Widget
Step 6: Either add more widgets or click ‘Save dashboard

Creating Alarms

Image: Services > CloudWatch > Alarms: Create Alarm

Billing Alarms

Image: How to enable Billing Alerts

Image: How to create a Billing Alarm

8.3) Quiz: CloudWatch Essentials

Q: Which are the three states of a CloudWatch alarm?
A: Alarm, insufficient data, ok

T: CPU utilization is a great metric to measure how much of your EC2 instances’ compute capacity is being used.

T: CloudWatch alarms are based on thresholds you create for specific CloudWatch metrics.

T: CloudWatch is a service that allows you to monitor various metrics inside your AWS account.

T: CloudWatch alarms can trigger SNS topics.

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