CloudWatch: Keeping an Eye on Your AWS Resources

CloudWatch is the monitoring service that tells you what's happening inside your AWS environment. It collects metrics, logs, and events. When I first set up a dashboard to monitor my EC2 CPU usage, I felt in control. You can create alarms that notify you when something goes wrong—like high CPU usage or low storage space. The free tier includes basic monitoring, but custom metrics and detailed monitoring cost a little extra. CloudWatch Logs is where your application logs go. You can search, filter, and set alarms on specific log events. It's the kind of service you don't appreciate until you need to debug something at 2 AM.