Hello and welcome to the final lecture in this course where I just want to quickly summarize what we have covered.  

So we now know what Amazon CloudWatch is, it’s a global service designed to be your window into the health and operational performance of your applications and infrastructure.  It comes complete with many different features that allow us to capture and log essential data relating to our resources and applications.  

By creating CloudWatch Dashboards you can build and customize different visual widgets to display metrics and alarms relating to your resources to form a unified view.  This provides a very quick and easy method of viewing the status of your infrastructure based on metrics you have defined.

CloudWatch Metrics are key to the service, they enable you to monitor a specific element of an application or resource over a period of time while tracking these data points.  This can help to ensure that you are not undersizing your resources, or in fact, oversizing your resource with too much spare capacity.  Different services offer different metrics, allowing you to monitor the most important performance factors for each service.

CloudWatch Alarms enable you to implement automatic responses and actions based on custom thresholds defined for your metrics. Alarms can be in any 1 of 3 different states, either 

• OK – The metric is within the defined configured threshold

• ALARM – The metric has exceeded the thresholds set 

• INSUFFICIENT_DATA – The alarm has just started, the metric is not available, or not enough data is available for the metric to determine the alarm state

By using CloudWatch EventBridge provides a means of connecting your own applications to different targets to allow you to implement a level of real-time monitoring, allowing you to respond to events that occur in your application as they happen.  This offers you the opportunity to implement a level of event-driven architecture in a real-time decoupled environment.  

CloudWatch Logs centralize your logs from different AWS services and applications allowing you to monitor them in real time and filter for specific entries and actions.  They can also capture log data from your on-premise infrastructure through the use of a logging agent.

There are 3 different variants of CloudWatch Insights, these being:

• Log Insights

• Container Insights

• Lambda Insights

And they all provide the ability to collate and display more information from the data that CloudWatch is collecting.  Log insights can analyze your logs at scale using interactive queries.  Container insights allow you to collate and group metric data from container services such as EKS and ECS, and Lambda insights provides you the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of your applications using AWS Lambda.

That now brings me to the end of this lecture and to the end of this course, and so you should now have a greater understanding of Amazon CloudWatch and the different features and options it can provide.

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Thank you for your time and good luck with your continued learning of cloud computing. Thank you.