Amazon CloudWatch can be useful for developers, system architects, and administrators. It helps them monitor their AWS applications that are in the cloud. CloudWatch is designed to provide metrics automatically on the basis of request counts, CPU usage, and latency. Users can send their own metrics and logs to CloudWatch to be monitored.

The data and reports that are provided by CloudWatch help users monitor the performance of their applications, resource utilization, issues regarding operations, and other possible obstacles, helping organizations resolve possible issues in the system.

CloudWatch is most commonly used with Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It can also monitor the Amazon Elastic Book Store (EBS) and Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs). It can also bend its core and primary rules to take in custom data, so it can extend its services. The most common reasons users opt for CloudWatch are because of its simple automatic integration with AWS services, the flexibility it provides, and its ability to scale.

To make it work with EC2, Amazon CloudWatch is configured differently and extended. This allows it to offer two distinct levels of monitoring, which are as follows:

Basic monitoring: This package includes seven pre-selected metrics along with three status check metrics, which are each generated at 5 minute and 1 minute intervals respectively; no extra payment is required

Detailed monitoring: With this, users are given the opportunity to perform checks more frequently as intervals are reduced to 1 minute; this package requires extra payment

Additional AWS services that can be automatically monitored by CloudWatch include the following:

EBS

RDS database instances

SQS Queues

SNS Topics