Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and management service that provides data and actionable insights for AWS, hybrid, and on-premises applications and infrastructure resources. With CloudWatch, you can collect and access all your performance and operational data in form of logs and metrics from a single platform. This allows you to overcome the challenge of monitoring individual systems and applications in silos (server, network, database, etc.). CloudWatch enables you to monitor your complete stack (applications, infrastructure, and services) and leverage alarms, logs, and events data to take automated actions and reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). This frees up important resources and allows you to focus on building applications and business value.

CloudWatch gives you actionable insights that help you optimize application performance, manage resource utilization, and understand system-wide operational health. CloudWatch provides up to 1-second visibility of metrics and logs data, 15 months of data retention (metrics), and the ability to perform calculations on metrics. This allows you to perform historical analysis for cost optimization and derive real-time insights into optimizing applications and infrastructure resources.