AWS Management, Monitoring & Cost

Amazon CloudWatch

Monitoring and observability: metrics, logs, alarms and dashboards for AWS resources and apps.

What is Amazon CloudWatch?

CloudWatch collects metrics and logs from AWS services and your applications, shows them on dashboards, and raises alarms when something goes wrong.

Key features

  • Metrics, dashboards and alarms
  • Centralised logs with Logs Insights queries
  • Application signals and synthetic canaries
  • Container and Lambda insights
  • Anomaly detection

What it is used for

  • Server and app monitoring
  • Alerts
  • Log search

When to use it

  • Monitoring any AWS workload
  • Alerting on errors and downtime
  • Searching application logs

When something else fits better

  • You already standardised on another monitoring platform and only need AWS data sent there

How pricing works

Many basic metrics are free; you pay for custom metrics, logs ingested and stored, dashboards, alarms and advanced features. Prices change and differ by region; we confirm current costs for your setup before you commit.

Equivalent on Google Cloud

The closest Google Cloud service is Cloud Monitoring: metrics, dashboards, uptime checks and alerts for Google Cloud, hybrid and other clouds.

How DomainHostly helps with Amazon CloudWatch

  • Plan: choose the right setup, size and region for your workload and budget.
  • Set up securely: configure Amazon CloudWatch with least-privilege access, encryption and backups where they apply.
  • Migrate: move from shared hosting, your own servers or the other cloud with minimal downtime.
  • Run and optimise: monitoring, updates and regular cost reviews so you only pay for what you use.

Management, Monitoring & Cost: Monitoring, logging, infrastructure as code, governance and cost management.

What to consider: Management, Monitoring & Cost

  • Define infrastructure as code so environments can be rebuilt and reviewed.
  • Set budgets and alerts in the first week; surprise bills are the most common cloud complaint.
  • Monitor what customers feel (uptime, errors, latency), not only server metrics.

Related services: Management, Monitoring & Cost