Learn about the versatility of Amazon CloudWatch and how several new features of this service are being applauded by many cloud customers.
If you’re new to the world of Amazon Web Services, you may not be privy to its wide array of cloud computing offerings. The slew of AWS services is strictly focused on ensuring that your servers and applications run properly in the cloud—one of the most popular being CloudWatch. Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for all your AWS resources, as well as any applications that run on Amazon’s cloud servers.
Why would you want to use Amazon CloudWatch?
CloudWatch processes raw data from your Amazon EC2 instances into readable, actionable, and near real-time metrics. These statistics allow you to look at historical data to gain a better understanding of how your cloud-based applications are actually performing.
You may not know this, but you’re probably already using CloudWatch because the standard Amazon EC2 console displays a variety of graphs with data from the product.
New features added to improve user interface and increase data retention
Amazon Web Services recently launched a number of product enhancements that is bringing a wave of excitement to CloudWatch users everywhere.
Improved metrics retention
When CloudWatch was first introduced in 2009, metrics were stored for just 14 days. One common request from AWS customers has always been to access data over longer periods of time.
To offer increased flexibility, CloudWatch added functionality to store metrics for up to 15 months at no additional charge. To keep the overall amount of data reasonable, historical data is stored at a lower granularity level, as indicated below:
- 1-minute data points will be available for 15 days
- 5-minute data points will be available for 63 days
- 1-hour data points will be available for 15 months (455 days)
Simplified user interface
Because of this new treasure trove of data, it was important for Amazon to also update their user interface to accommodate these metrics. The CloudWatch Console now offers a card-style view that easily identifies AWS metrics as well as custom ones that you may have created. Easily search for metrics of interest by using the search bar.
Since metrics are now stored for 15 months, the next step was to figure out how to make these metrics easier to comprehend. For this reason, two new tabs have been added: Graph options and Graphed metrics.
These new functions allow you to easily create alarms, duplicate a certain metric, or delete it entirely from a graph. In addition, you’ll be able to use the new date-picker tool to select a time frame that is of interest to you.
Updated CloudWatch features are available now
All the updated Amazon CloudWatch features outlined in this blog are available now across the U.S. and in several Amazon data centers around the world. If you’d like to learn more about Amazon CloudWatch or any of the new features discussed in this blog, feel free to reach out to the CloudHesive team at 800-860-2040 or through our online contact form.
