Amazon CloudWatch Agent

An Amazon CloudWatch Agent is an AWS monitoring software agent that collects system metrics and application logs from Amazon EC2 instances that Amazon CloudWatch cannot access by default.

• AKA: CloudWatch Agent, CWAgent, Amazon CW Agent, CloudWatch Unified Agent.
• Context:
  • It can typically collect Amazon EC2 memory metrics with RAM utilization data that hypervisor-level monitoring cannot access.
  • It can typically gather Amazon EC2 disk space metrics through file system analysis for storage capacity planning.
  • It can often stream Amazon EC2 application logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs for centralized log analysis.
  • It can monitor Amazon EC2 process-level metrics with per-process resource consumption data.
  • It can collect Amazon EC2 network performance metrics including packet loss rates and TCP connection counts.
  • It can gather Amazon EC2 GPU metrics for machine learning workloads on GPU-enabled instances.
  • It can support Amazon CloudWatch high-resolution metrics with sub-minute granularity for real-time monitoring.
  • It can enable Amazon CloudWatch cross-account monitoring through AWS Organizations integration.
  • It can perform Amazon CloudWatch log filtering with metric filters for custom alarm creation.
  • It can range from being a Basic Amazon CloudWatch Agent to being an Advanced Amazon CloudWatch Agent, depending on its configuration complexity.
  • It can integrate with AWS IAM for secure credential management.
  • It can integrate with AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store for centralized configuration management.
  • It can support Amazon CloudWatch custom metrics through StatsD protocol or collectd protocol.
  • It can enable Amazon CloudWatch embedded metric format for high-cardinality data ingestion.
  • It can provide Amazon CloudWatch namespace isolation for multi-tenant environments.
  • ...
• Examples:
  • Amazon CloudWatch Agent Deployments, such as:
    • Amazon EC2 Linux CloudWatch Agent, such as:
      • Ubuntu CloudWatch Agent for Apache web server monitoring.
      • Amazon Linux CloudWatch Agent for containerized application monitoring.
      • Red Hat Enterprise Linux CloudWatch Agent for enterprise application monitoring.
    • Amazon EC2 Windows CloudWatch Agent for IIS web server monitoring.
    • Amazon ECS CloudWatch Agent for container insight collection.
    • Amazon EKS CloudWatch Agent for Kubernetes cluster monitoring.
  • Amazon CloudWatch Agent Metric Collections, such as:
    • Memory Utilization Metric Collection for OOM prevention.
    • Disk Space Metric Collection for storage capacity alerts.
    • Process-Level Metric Collection for application performance monitoring.
    • Network Performance Metric Collection for bandwidth utilization tracking.
    • Custom Application Metric Collection for business KPI monitoring.
  • Amazon CloudWatch Agent Configurations, such as:
    • JSON-Based CloudWatch Agent Configuration for declarative setup.
    • Wizard-Based CloudWatch Agent Configuration for interactive setup.
    • SSM-Managed CloudWatch Agent Configuration for centralized management.
  • Amazon CloudWatch Agent Integrations, such as:
    • CloudWatch Agent X-Ray Integration for distributed tracing correlation.
    • CloudWatch Agent EventBridge Integration for event-driven automation.
    • CloudWatch Agent SNS Integration for alert notification.
  • ...
• Counter-Examples:
  • Amazon CloudWatch, which lacks guest OS metric collection capability.
  • AWS Systems Manager Agent, which focuses on configuration management rather than metric collection.
  • Datadog Agent, which sends metrics to third-party monitoring platforms.
  • Prometheus Node Exporter, which uses pull-based metric collection rather than push-based metric collection.
  • AWS X-Ray Daemon, which specializes in distributed tracing rather than metric collection.
• See: Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Monitoring System, Amazon EC2 Instance, AWS CloudWatch Logs, AWS Systems Manager, Amazon CloudWatch Metrics.

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