Getting started with Amazon CloudWatch

Monitoring and troubleshooting AWS

John Q. Martin

Principal Consultant

Course overview

Chapter 1 - Introduction to CloudWatch

Observability Vs. Monitoring & what is CloudWatch

Chapter 2 - Logs, alarms, & notifications

Collecting and querying logs, alarm conditions, and how to send alerts

Chapter 3 - Tracing & Dashboards

Distributed application tracing, and application health dashboards

Illustration of a monitoring dashboard with charts and a gauge, an alarm bell, and a connected cloud service map representing metrics, alerts, and tracing

Prerequisites

Comfortable navigating the AWS Management Console
Familiar with core services: EC2, Lambda, and DynamoDB
Basic command-line and JSON familiarity

Illustration of a cloud branching to three core AWS services: a server for compute, a Lambda function, and a database

Definitions

Monitoring

"Is my system working as expected?"

Observability

"Why is my system behaving this way?"

Icon representing monitoring, detecting whether a system is working as expected

Icon representing observability, understanding why a system behaves a certain way

Monitoring and observability characteristics

Comparison table of monitoring versus observability characteristics

The troubleshooting workflow

Cyclical workflow loop of five stages: an alarm bell, a dashboard, a document with a magnifier, a wrench, and a checkmark, connected by arrows looping clockwise

Detect: metrics and alarms surface a problem
Triage: dashboards show scope and impact
Diagnose: logs and traces find the cause
Fix, then verify: ship a change, confirm recovery

What is Amazon CloudWatch

CLoudWatch Service Logo

What is Amazon CloudWatch

CLoudWatch Service Logo

Central place for monitoring and observability
Collect, view, and analyze operational data
Powers monitoring embedded in other AWS services

What is Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch capabilities diagram highlighting event monitoring

What is Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch icon, with feature icons for metric insights, logs, alarms, cross-account observability, event and time based events, and rules.

What is Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch capabilities diagram highlighting logs, metrics, and dashboards

What is Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch capabilities diagram highlighting rules and alarms that trigger actions

The CloudWatch console

AWS console

Create and view dashboards
View metric and log data
Configure CloudWatch capabilities

CloudWatch metrics

Animation of browsing DynamoDB metrics in the CloudWatch console and zooming into a spike

Custom metrics

Capture application-specific data
Publish via CLI, REST API, or SDK
Up to 30 dimensions for filtering and search
Send single or multiple data points per call

aws cloudwatch put-metric-data \
    --metric-name ActiveUsers --namespace MyBusinessApp \
    --unit Count --value 21333 \
    --dimensions InstanceId=myinstance66,InstanceType=m1.small

aws cloudwatch put-metric-data --metric-name ActiveUsers \
    --namespace MyBusinessApp --value 20 --timestamp 2026-04-20T12:00:00.000Z
aws cloudwatch put-metric-data --metric-name ActiveUsers \
    --namespace MyBusinessApp --value 36 --timestamp 2026-04-20T12:01:00.000Z

Let's practice!

Monitoring and troubleshooting AWS