Hello and welcome to this course on Amazon CloudWatch Anomaly Detection. My name is Stephen Cole and I’ll be your instructor.  I’ve been working in the cloud for several years and currently hold many active AWS certifications.

My contact information is shown on the screen.  Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions, comments, or concerns. Alternatively, you can always get in touch with us here at Cloud Academy by sending an email to support@cloudacademy.com and one of our cloud experts will follow up with you.

I've written this course for people that want to learn about creating Amazon CloudWatch Alarms using Anomaly Detection.  While I was writing it, I realized that while people might be interested in learning how it works because they've heard about it.  There is probably a large number of people that don't know that they need to learn about this feature of Amazon CloudWatch.

Through the years, I've found that one of life's truths is that naming things is hard. Anomaly Detection is a great example of this difficulty.   While it accurately describes what it does inside Amazon CloudWatch, as a name, it does a disservice to what makes it useful.  It does not really describe the pain point that it addresses.

Amazon CloudWatch Anomaly Detection is for people that want or need to create CloudWatch Alarms that are almost completely automated.  There's some human intervention required.  However, most of the behind-the-scenes work is done by AWS.

I expect that, before you start taking this course, you have some experience running workloads in the AWS cloud, have a basic understanding of what Amazon CloudWatch is, know how to create CloudWatch Alarms, and how to trigger an action or notification based on an Alarm's state.

Having this knowledge will help you get the most out of the materials presented. However, it's not required. In these lectures, I do take some time to review Amazon CloudWatch and how it works.  That said, some of the details might not be as clear as they could be if this is your first exposure to monitoring metrics and creating alarms using Amazon CloudWatch.

I have several objectives for this course. I am going to cover Amazon CloudWatch and CloudWatch Alarms using Anomaly Detection. I will review, at a very high level, what Amazon CloudWatch is and how monitored metrics go into an ALARM state. I will then talk about the challenges of creating CloudWatch Alarms, explain the benefits of Machine Learning, and outline how these benefits improve creating Alarms.

When you're finished with this course, you should be able to create a CloudWatch Alarm using Anomaly Detection and see a visualization of it.  You will also be aware of what types of metrics are suitable for use with Anomaly Detection.

Please note that, at the time this content was written, the course information was accurate. AWS implements hundreds of updates every month as part of its ongoing drive to innovate and enhance its services. As a result, minor discrepancies may appear in the course content over time.  Here at Cloud Academy, we strive to keep our courses up to date in order to provide the best training available.

If you notice any information that is outdated, please contact support@cloudacademy.com. This will allow us to update the course during the next release cycle.  We would love to hear from you. I would love to hear from you.  Tell me what you learned, what could use some attention, or what worked really well for you.  

That said, let's get started.