Amazon CloudWatch enables monitoring of Amazon services, standard and custom defined metrics, and a variety of logs. Typically, you would want to retrieve metrics for analysis and/or integration with other monitoring tools. CloudWatch provides APIs to retrieve hundreds of metrics by namespace, start and finish times, intervals, and so on.

CloudWatch logs can be monitored for errors, exceptions, HTTP response codes, Amazon S3 logs, specific messages or custom metrics published by the application, and so on. In addition, you can also use the logs to correlate system status with change events such as when AWS CloudFormation is used to roll out a new stack. We can define metric filters on the logs and raise alerts based on specific thresholds. These alerts can in turn be forwarded to SNS topics for appropriate notifications to be pushed out. The metric filters can be based on literal terms, or common log formats, or specified using JSON. In addition, you can combine...