Amazon CloudWatch API
Collect, store, query, and alarm on metrics and logs from AWS services and custom applications, providing unified observability across the AWS environment.
Score Breakdown
⚙ Agent Friendliness
🔒 Security
IAM action-level policies for both CloudWatch and CloudWatch Logs namespaces. Log groups support KMS encryption at rest. VPC endpoints available for private connectivity. CloudWatch does not store sensitive credentials — metric names and dimensions are metadata.
⚡ Reliability
Best When
You need native, zero-configuration observability for AWS services with tight integration to alarms, Auto Scaling, Lambda, and SNS — especially when you do not want to manage a separate monitoring stack.
Avoid When
You need multi-cloud observability, vendor-neutral instrumentation (OpenTelemetry at scale), or rich APM features — Datadog, Grafana, or New Relic provide a better experience.
Use Cases
- • Publish custom application metrics via PutMetricData and create alarms that trigger SNS notifications or Auto Scaling actions when thresholds are breached
- • Query application logs stored in CloudWatch Logs using CloudWatch Logs Insights to investigate errors or calculate aggregate statistics
- • Build operational dashboards by programmatically creating CloudWatch dashboards with widgets for key service metrics
- • Retrieve historical metric data via GetMetricStatistics or GetMetricData to generate SLA reports or capacity planning analyses
- • Set up composite alarms that trigger only when multiple underlying alarms are in ALARM state, reducing alert fatigue for complex dependency chains
Not For
- • Long-term data warehousing or analytics — CloudWatch metrics retention is limited (15 months max) and costs scale with data volume
- • Full-text search over logs at petabyte scale — OpenSearch Service or S3 + Athena is more appropriate
- • Application performance monitoring (APM) with distributed tracing — use AWS X-Ray instead
Interface
Authentication
AWS SigV4. IAM actions include cloudwatch:PutMetricData, cloudwatch:GetMetricStatistics, cloudwatch:PutMetricAlarm, logs:CreateLogGroup, logs:PutLogEvents, logs:StartQuery. CloudWatch and CloudWatch Logs are separate IAM namespaces.
Pricing
Costs scale significantly at high metric and log volumes. High-resolution metrics (1-second granularity) cost more than standard (1-minute). Contributor Insights and anomaly detection are priced separately.
Agent Metadata
Known Gotchas
- ⚠ Metric data points have a 2-week delay floor for high-resolution and a 2-hour minimum ingestion delay; newly published metrics may not be immediately retrievable via GetMetricData
- ⚠ CloudWatch Logs and CloudWatch Metrics are separate boto3 clients (logs vs cloudwatch); agents that conflate them will hit 'operation not found' errors when using the wrong client
- ⚠ Logs Insights queries are asynchronous — StartQuery returns a queryId and agents must poll GetQueryResults until the status is 'Complete', handling 'Running' and 'Failed' states explicitly
- ⚠ PutLogEvents requires a sequenceToken for existing log streams (or fails with InvalidSequenceTokenException); use the token from the most recent PutLogEvents or DescribeLogStreams response, or use the CloudWatch Logs Agent/SDK which handles this automatically
- ⚠ Alarm state changes are not pushed to agents — agents monitoring alarm status must poll DescribeAlarms; for event-driven patterns, configure CloudWatch Alarms to publish to SNS and have the agent subscribe
Alternatives
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Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-07.