Welcome to Chronicles, let's explore AWS Cloudwatch.

Description:

Amazon CloudWatch is a comprehensive monitoring and observability service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It helps you collect and track various metrics, collect and monitor log files, and set alarms. This service is primarily designed for managing and monitoring AWS resources and applications, but it can also be extended to on-premises resources and other cloud environments.

Here's a brief description of key features and components of Amazon CloudWatch:

1. Metrics: CloudWatch allows you to collect and store data about the performance and health of your resources. These metrics can be generated by various AWS services, custom applications, or any other data source you want to monitor. Metrics are stored for up to 15 months, and you can visualize them using graphs and dashboards.

2. Alarms: You can set up alarms based on CloudWatch metrics to trigger automated actions or notifications when certain thresholds are breached. For example, you can set up an alarm to notify you when CPU utilization on an EC2 instance exceeds a certain percentage.

3. Dashboards: CloudWatch provides customizable dashboards that allow you to visualize your application's performance data and metrics in one place. You can create widgets and arrange them to create a custom monitoring dashboard that suits your needs.

4. Logs: CloudWatch Logs allows you to store, monitor, and access log files from your AWS resources. You can create log groups to organize log streams, and set up filters to extract and forward specific log events to other AWS services for analysis.

5. Events: CloudWatch Events allows you to respond to changes in your AWS environment. You can create rules that match events and trigger actions, such as running an AWS Lambda function or notifying an Amazon SNS topic.

6. Synthetics: CloudWatch Synthetics allows you to create canaries, which are scripts that monitor your endpoints and APIs. These canaries can be set up to mimic user interactions and ensure your applications are performing as expected.

7. Application Insights: For applications that use AWS resources, CloudWatch Application Insights provides a consolidated view of your application's health and performance. It can automatically detect issues and provide root cause analysis.

8. X-Ray Integration: CloudWatch seamlessly integrates with AWS X-Ray, which provides end-to-end tracing for distributed applications. This integration helps you understand how requests are flowing through your services.

9. Cross-Account and Cross-Region Monitoring: You can set up CloudWatch to monitor resources in different AWS accounts and regions, allowing you to have centralized visibility and control over your entire AWS infrastructure.

10. Custom Metrics: In addition to AWS-generated metrics, you can publish your own custom metrics to CloudWatch, allowing you to monitor specific application-level data and performance statistics.

Amazon CloudWatch is a crucial tool for DevOps, system administrators, and developers who need to ensure the availability, reliability, and performance of their AWS resources and applications. It provides the necessary insights and tools to manage, monitor, and troubleshoot complex cloud environments.

Procedure:

1. Log into your AWS account via AWS Management Console (opens in a new tab).

2. Launch an Instance.

3. Navigate to CloudWatch service, Click on Alarms in the left pane and select Create Alarms -> Select Metric -> EC2 -> Per-Instance Metrics and select the metric of CPU Utilization and click on Select Metric.

4. Specify the metric and conditions, Period=5 minutes, threshold greater than 100 -> Next

5. For Configure Actions, Create a new topic, enter email id and select Create Topic, click Next

6. Give a name to the alarm -> Create alarm

7. Alarm is successfully created.

Congratulations!! You have successfully explored the features of AWS Cloudwatch and succesfully created Cloudwatch alarm.