CloudWatch Agent & CloudWatch Logs Agent¶

CloudWatch Logs for EC2¶

• By default, no logs from your EC2 machine will go to CloudWatch
• You need to run a CloudWatch agent on EC2 to push the log files you want
• Make sure IAM permissions are correct
• The CloudWatch log agent can be setup on-premises too

CloudWatch Logs Agent & Unified Agent¶

• For virtual servers (EC2 instances, on-premise servers)
• CloudWatch Logs Agent
  • Old version of the agent
  • Can only send to CloudWatch Logs
• CloudWatch Unified Agent
  • Collect additional system-level metrics such as RAM, processes, etc
  • Collect logs to send to CloudWatch Logs
  • Centralized configuration using SSM Parameter Store

CloudWatch Unified Agent - Metrics¶

• Collected directly on your Linux Server / EC2 instance

• CPU (active, guest, idle, system, user, steal)

• Disk metrics (free, used, total), Disk IO (writes, reads, bytes, iops)
• RAM (free, inactive, used, total, cached)
• Netstat (number of TCP and UDP connections, net packets, bytes)
• Processes (total, dead, bloqued, idle, running, sleep)

• Swap Space (free, used, used %)

• Reminder: out-of-the-box metrics for EC2 - disk, CPU, network (high level)