From the course: Monitoring AWS with CloudWatch (2020)

CloudWatch metrics - Amazon Web Services (AWS) Tutorial

From the course: Monitoring AWS with CloudWatch (2020)

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CloudWatch metrics

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- [Narrator] In a CloudWatch metrics are a fundamental concept. A metric represents a set of data points that are time order, which get pushed to CloudWatch. We can think of them as a variable that we can monitor with the data points representing the values over a period of time. An example would be the hourly average number of requests for a particular API that we might have on our environment. These will have the number of times that our API has been invoked spread out over time. Using the data points, we can easily determine the times that our API is being utilized the most and the least. From this, we can make decisions. For example, we can decide to scale our application instances up when the number of requests hits a particular upper threshold in order to optimum performance and then scale back down when the lower threshold is hit so we can lower our costs. The metric data points can come from any application or business activity that we might choose to collect data for. This can help us understand how our services and our business activities are performing. AWS services, send metrics to cloud automatically, and we can also send our own custom metrics to CloudWatch as well. We can enter data points in any order at any rate we want. And then we can retrieve statistics about those data points as an ordered set of time series data, In AWS, each region is designed to be completely isolated from other regions. This is so we can achieve the greatest possible failure isolation and stability. This forces metric to exist only in the region in which they were created. We can still overcome this limitation by using a CloudWatch cross-region functionality in order to aggregate statistics from different regions. This will help us get a birds eye view of all our services across all regions, but in most cases, we'll only need to view metrics in a given region.

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