CloudWatch

General usage

CloudWatch’s most important benefit is that it improves the observability of the health of complex applications such as marketplaces. Observability is the ability of collected data streams to produce accurate and actionable insights about an application’s inner workings.

CloudWatch collects data in the form of logs, metrics, and events from your entire AWS ecosystem and presents it on one platform. This helps developers and application administrators gain system-wide insights into the health and performance of an application, which makes it easier to resolve issues, optimise resources, and scale infrastructure.

Key features of CloudWatch include:

• Manage resources better and optimise scaling with automated actions, e.g. increasing data storage or server resources when a certain usage threshold is reached.
• Quickly detect and action anomalous behaviour by setting alarms for certain events.
• Make data more digestible and easier to interpret by visualizing logs and metrics.
• Add custom metrics to support your business logic.

Popularity

CloudWatch is the most popular cloud monitoring service on Stackshare by far.

Marketplace benefit

CobbleWeb uses CloudWatch to monitor how well we are scaling AWS infrastructure. It also helps us track any system errors via logs, as well as overall application performance. 

Just Eat, a food delivery marketplace, implemented CloudWatch to accelerate code changes and optimise resource usage. They used alerts to help them manage scaling of their backend, which lowered resource costs without impacting on the user experience.