CloudWatch centralizes most essential functionalities for a monitoring solution. We used some of its functionalities previously when we created our Auto Scaling groups and needed an alarm to trigger Auto Scaling Events, but CloudWatch can do a lot more.

In the world of infrastructure, data mostly comes in two types—metrics and logs. CloudWatch supports both data types. In addition, it also have a third type of data called events.

As with most services, you can access it using the web console, the command-line interface, and, of course, the API and various SDKs. We will first look at the different types of data.