CloudWatch is AWS’s monitoring service — metrics, logs, alarms, dashboards. If you need to know what your resources are doing or get paged when something breaks, that’s CloudWatch. People confuse it with CloudTrail constantly, so pin down the difference.
CloudWatch vs CloudTrail
CloudWatch watches performance (CPU, memory, request counts) and fires alarms. CloudTrail watches activity (who did what, which API call, when). Monitoring health = CloudWatch; auditing actions = CloudTrail.
Test yourself
You need to trigger an alert when an EC2 instance’s CPU stays above 80% for five minutes. Which service?
- AWS CloudTrail
- Amazon CloudWatch
- AWS Config
- Amazon Inspector
👉 Click to reveal the answer & explanation
Correct answer: B. CloudWatch metric alarms watch performance data like CPU and trigger notifications. CloudTrail (A) logs API activity, not performance; Config (C) tracks resource configuration; Inspector (D) is security assessment.
Related topics
AWS CloudTrail · Auto Scaling · Amazon EC2
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