Beginner LevelCloud Computing (AWS/GCP/Azure)
How do AWS CloudWatch Logs, Metrics, and Alarms monitor cloud infrastructure?
❓ Interview Prompt: Explain Amazon CloudWatch architecture, Log Groups, Metric data points, Metric Filters, and automated Alarms.
Amazon CloudWatch is the core observability and monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and applications.
Core Observability Pillars:
1
CloudWatch Metrics: Collects numeric performance data points (e.g. EC2 CPUUtilization, RDS FreeableMemory) sampled over time windows.
2
CloudWatch Logs: Centralized log store organizing application and system logs into Log Groups and Log Streams.
3
Metric Filters: Extracts structured numerical metrics from raw text log streams using pattern matching (e.g. counting 'ERROR' occurrences).
4
CloudWatch Alarms: Triggers automated actions (sending SNS emails, scaling Auto Scaling Groups, executing Lambda functions) when a metric crosses a threshold.
Code Implementation Example
hcl
# CloudWatch Alarm triggering SNS alert when CPU > 85%
resource "aws_cloudwatch_metric_alarm" "high_cpu" {
alarm_name = "high-cpu-alarm"
comparison_operator = "GreaterThanOrEqualToThreshold"
evaluation_periods = 2
metric_name = "CPUUtilization"
namespace = "AWS/EC2"
period = 300 # 5 Minutes
statistic = "Average"
threshold = 85.0
alarm_actions = [aws_sns_topic.alerts.arn]
}💡Terraform CloudWatch metric alarm configuration for high CPU.
🎯 Interview Key Takeaway
CloudWatch aggregates metrics and logs, triggering automated scaling or alerts when metric thresholds break.
#CloudWatch#Observability#Metrics#Alarms#Beginner
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