AWS Cloudwatch Monitoring

Question

Just wondering if the AWS cloudwatch runs on the same VPC where i have all my applications are running?

Is there any chance that AWS cloudwatch might go down and we may loose the monitoring capability?

Do we need to have a monitoring mechanism to check the Cloudwatch health?

Thanks

Answer 1

AWS Cloudwatch isn't run on your instances. Its infrastructure is fully managed by Amazon and independent from your VPC. You can see it as a SaaS (Software as a Service).

So you don't have to worry about that. For more informations, please see: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/

Answer 2

Cloudwatch collects data from the host OS, where your VMs are actually running.

If the physical server had a significant issue both cloudwatch and your VM would go down but in that case the VM would get started automatically on another physical server. In such a case, recovery would be usually quite quickly.

You don't need to check Cloudwatch at all because AWS handles that but you could add alerts for things such as CPU usage on your VMs.

Because Cloudwatch doesn't run on your machines it can't know some things such as memory usage, disk space usage or others so if you need more advanced monitoring capabilities you might consider running something like collectd inside your virtual machine.

Answer 3

Just wondering if the AWS cloudwatch runs on the same VPC where i have all my applications are running?

If you chose to install CloudWatch Agent on your EC2 then only it runs in your EC2 and thus in the VPC your EC2 is provisioned.

CloudWatch service that publishes/maintain logs, metrics, alarms etc is managed by AWS and runs outside your VPC.

CloudWatch has a SLA of 99.9% https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/sla/

Is there any chance that AWS cloudwatch might go down and we may loose the monitoring capability?

CloudWatch like any other service can have outages and it did have some in the past but I have never seen any data getting lost, only temporarily not being available or slow to retrieve during the outage.

Do we need to have a monitoring mechanism to check the Cloudwatch health?

SLA is already 99.9% for CloudWatch Service so chances of catching a blip is very rare on your own monitoring mechanism.

If you are using CloudWatch Agent then consider checking health of agent to make sure it is in running state (you can use AWS System Manager Run command).