Can we use CloudWatch for monitoring apps outside AWS?

Question

Say I have few applications running on physical machines which are not part of AWS infra, is it possible for such applications to publish metrics to cloudwatch and use its alerting mechanism?

Docs do not mention this case, and it seems that CloudWatch CLIs just take metrics as arguments and probably derive the AWS instance ID and send the metric to CloudWatch.

Answer 1

It is possible to use CloudWatch to record custom metrics even if your apps do not run on the AWS EC2 infrastructure. See this blog post that announces the introduction of custom metrics (in 2011) and the CloudWatch custom metrics documentation for more details.