AWS CloudWatch
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
CloudWatch is AWS's built-in monitoring system. It watches your stuff — CPU usage, error rates, response times — and yells at you when things go sideways. It's like a smoke detector for your infrastructure, except it also keeps a diary of everything that happened. Dashboards, alarms, logs — it's all here.
Real Talk
Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service that collects metrics, logs, and events from AWS resources and applications. It provides dashboards, alarms with automated actions, log analysis (CloudWatch Logs Insights), and anomaly detection. It's the default monitoring solution for all AWS services.
When You'll Hear This
"Set up a CloudWatch alarm for when CPU exceeds 80%." / "Check CloudWatch Logs to see why the Lambda timed out."
Related Terms
Alerting
Alerting is the part of monitoring that actually wakes people up when something goes wrong.
Grafana
Grafana is the visualization layer for all your monitoring data.
Logging
Logging is writing a diary for your program.
Monitoring
Monitoring is keeping a constant eye on your app while it runs — tracking whether it's up, how fast it responds, how many errors it throws, and how much me...
Prometheus
Prometheus scrapes your services every 15 seconds asking 'how are you?' and stores the answers (metrics) as time series.