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Logging

CloudWatch

  • CloudWatch Unified agent: Collect additional system-level metrics such as RAM, processes etc.
  • Batch log events for increasing throughput.
  • Use Kinesis agent to send logs to Kinesis.
  • Neither CloudWatch Logs Agent and CloudWatch Unified Agent can send logs to Kinesis!

Alarms

  • A CloudWatch alarm watches a metric and triggers when they exceed a certain threshold or decrease below some point. You can configure it to send a message to an Amazon SNS topic you subscribed to. So, you can get notified when an alarm is triggered.

Events

  • Most AWS services emit events to Amazon CloudWatch Events when their states change or a specific event occurs in that service.
  • For example, if a deployment fails on AWS CodeDeploy, it submits an event to CloudWatch Events.
  • You can define an event rule for an event to take an action when that event occurs.

Events are triggered when a state changes (or) on a particular schedule. Alarm requires a threshold to be reached!

Alarms invoke actions only for sustained changes. Alarms watch a single metric and respond to changes in that metric; events can respond to actions (for example, call a lambda function based on EC2 state change).

You cannot trigger an AWS Lambda function directly from a CloudWatch Alarm

For proactive scale-out ot scale-in actions, CloudWatch alarms come in handy.

You can use Amazon CloudWatch Events to build event-driven architectures

CloudWatch alarms are NOT triggered by actions such as EC2 state changes. CloudWatch Events can be triggered by EC2 state changes!

CloudWatch unified agent CANNOT collect EC2 state changes!

X-Ray

  • Use X-Ray for distributed tracing