CloudWatch Monitoring Supported AWS Services

• CloudWatch offers either basic or detailed monitoring for supported AWS services.
• Basic monitoring means that a service sends data points to CloudWatch every five minutes.
• Detailed monitoring means that a service sends data points to CloudWatch every minute.
• If the AWS service supports both basic and detailed monitoring, the basic would be enabled by default and the detailed monitoring needs to be enabled for detailed metrics.
• High-Resolution Custom Metrics allow publishing data at 1-second resolution using the PutMetricData API with a StorageResolution of 1.

Monitoring Categories

• Basic Monitoring – Free, default set of metrics published at 5-minute intervals for most services.
• Detailed Monitoring – Paid, more frequent metrics (typically 1-minute intervals). Must be explicitly enabled.
• High-Resolution Custom Metrics – Custom metrics published at up to 1-second intervals using PutMetricData API or Embedded Metric Format (EMF).

Services Offering Detailed Monitoring

The following services officially offer detailed monitoring (paid, more fine-grained metrics):

• Amazon API Gateway – Additional dimensions for detailed metrics
• AWS AppSync – Detailed CloudWatch metrics
• Amazon CloudFront – Additional distribution metrics
• Amazon EC2 – 1-minute metrics (vs. 5-minute basic)
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk – Enhanced health reporting and monitoring
• Amazon Kinesis Data Streams – Enhanced shard-level metrics
• AWS Lambda – Event source mapping metrics
• Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) – Per-broker, per-topic metrics
• Amazon S3 – Request metrics at 1-minute intervals
• Amazon SES – Detailed monitoring via event publishing

AWS Services with Monitoring Support

• Auto Scaling
  • By default, basic monitoring is enabled when the launch configuration is created using the AWS Management Console, and detailed monitoring is enabled when the launch configuration is created using the AWS CLI or an API.
  • Auto Scaling sends data to CloudWatch every 5 minutes by default when created from Console.
  • For an additional charge, you can enable detailed monitoring for Auto Scaling, which sends data to CloudWatch every minute.
• Amazon CloudFront
  • Amazon CloudFront sends data to CloudWatch every minute by default.
  • Additional distribution metrics (detailed monitoring) can be enabled for more fine-grained visibility.
• Amazon CloudSearch
  • Amazon CloudSearch sends data to CloudWatch every minute by default.
• Amazon EventBridge (formerly Amazon CloudWatch Events)
  • Amazon EventBridge sends data to CloudWatch every minute by default.
• Amazon CloudWatch Logs
  • Amazon CloudWatch Logs sends data to CloudWatch every minute by default.
• Amazon DynamoDB
  • Amazon DynamoDB sends data to CloudWatch every minute for some metrics and every 5 minutes for other metrics.
  • DynamoDB Contributor Insights provides additional metrics for table and global secondary index access patterns.
• Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
  • Amazon ECS sends data to CloudWatch every minute.
  • Container Insights provides additional detailed metrics at the cluster, service, task, and container level including CPU, memory, network, and storage metrics.
• Amazon ElastiCache
  • Amazon ElastiCache sends data to CloudWatch every minute.
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
  • Amazon EBS sends data to CloudWatch every 5 minutes for gp2, st1, and sc1 volumes.
  • Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1 and io2) volumes automatically send one-minute metrics to CloudWatch.
  • gp3 volumes also send metrics at 1-minute intervals.
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
  • Amazon EC2 sends data to CloudWatch every 5 minutes by default. For an additional charge, you can enable detailed monitoring for Amazon EC2, which sends data to CloudWatch every minute.
• Elastic Load Balancing
  • Elastic Load Balancing sends data to CloudWatch every minute (applies to ALB, NLB, GLB, and Classic Load Balancer).
• Amazon EMR (formerly Amazon Elastic MapReduce)
  • Amazon EMR sends basic data to CloudWatch every 5 minutes by default at no additional cost.
  • Starting with Amazon EMR Release 7.0+, the CloudWatch Agent can publish 34 enhanced metrics every minute (additional charges apply).
  • EMR Serverless sends metrics to CloudWatch every minute.
• Amazon OpenSearch Service (formerly Amazon Elasticsearch Service)
  • Amazon OpenSearch Service sends data to CloudWatch every minute.
• Amazon Kinesis Data Streams (formerly Amazon Kinesis Streams)
  • Amazon Kinesis Data Streams sends stream-level data to CloudWatch every minute.
  • Enhanced shard-level metrics (detailed monitoring) provide additional per-shard metrics.
• Amazon Data Firehose (formerly Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose)
  • Amazon Data Firehose sends data to CloudWatch every minute.
• AWS Lambda
  • AWS Lambda sends data to CloudWatch every minute.
  • Lambda Insights provides enhanced monitoring with system-level metrics (CPU, memory, network) at 1-minute intervals.
• Amazon SageMaker AI
  • Amazon SageMaker AI (which replaced the legacy Amazon Machine Learning service) sends training, endpoint, and transform job metrics to CloudWatch every minute.
⚠️ Note: The original Amazon Machine Learning service is no longer accepting new users. AWS recommends using Amazon SageMaker AI for machine learning workloads.
• Amazon Redshift
  • Amazon Redshift sends data to CloudWatch every minute.
• Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
  • Amazon RDS sends data to CloudWatch every minute.
  • CloudWatch Database Insights (launched Dec 2024) provides comprehensive database observability with fleet-level and instance-level dashboards.
• Amazon Route 53
  • Amazon Route 53 sends data to CloudWatch every minute.
• Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
  • Amazon SNS sends data to CloudWatch every 5 minutes.
  • SNS does not support detailed (1-minute) monitoring.
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
  • Amazon SQS sends data to CloudWatch every 5 minutes.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
  • Amazon S3 sends storage metrics (bucket size, object count) to CloudWatch once a day (basic monitoring, free).
  • Request metrics (detailed monitoring) are available at 1-minute intervals and are billed as CloudWatch custom metrics.
  • 1-minute metrics are available at the bucket-level by default when request metrics are enabled.
• Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF)
  • Amazon SWF sends data to CloudWatch every 5 minutes.
  • Note: AWS Step Functions is the recommended alternative for new workflow orchestration workloads.
• AWS Storage Gateway
  • AWS Storage Gateway sends data to CloudWatch every 5 minutes.
• AWS WAF
  • AWS WAF sends data to CloudWatch every minute.
• Amazon WorkSpaces
  • Amazon WorkSpaces sends data to CloudWatch every 5 minutes.

Additional Services Publishing CloudWatch Metrics (2024-2026)

The following additional AWS services publish metrics to CloudWatch (not in the original list):

• Amazon API Gateway – Sends metrics every minute
• AWS AppSync – Sends metrics every minute
• Amazon EKS – Control plane metrics and Container Insights
• Amazon Bedrock – Model invocation and throughput metrics
• AWS Step Functions – Execution metrics every minute
• Amazon Aurora – Database metrics every minute (with Database Insights)
• AWS Fargate – Container-level metrics via Container Insights
• Amazon MSK – Streaming metrics with per-broker/topic detail
• AWS Network Firewall – Firewall metrics every minute
• Amazon MemoryDB – Database metrics every minute

CloudWatch Enhanced Observability Features

• Container Insights – Collects and aggregates metrics and logs from containerized applications on Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and Kubernetes. Provides cluster, node, pod, task, and service level metrics.
• Lambda Insights – Enhanced monitoring for Lambda functions with system-level metrics (CPU, memory, network, disk).
• Database Insights (Dec 2024) – Comprehensive database observability for Amazon RDS and Aurora with fleet-level health monitoring and instance-level SQL query analysis.
• Application Signals (June 2024) – Application performance monitoring (APM) with pre-built dashboards showing volume, availability, latency, faults, and errors.
• Internet Monitor – Near-continuous internet measurements for availability and performance, tailored to your workload footprint on AWS.
• CloudWatch Investigations – AI-powered investigation of operational issues across services.

AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions

• Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
• AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
• AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
• Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.

1. What is the minimum time interval for the data that Amazon CloudWatch receives and aggregates?
   1. One second (High-resolution custom metrics support 1-second resolution)
   2. Five seconds
   3. One minute
   4. Three minutes
   5. Five minutes

   Note: The original answer was “One minute” which was correct for standard metrics. With high-resolution custom metrics (introduced 2017), CloudWatch supports 1-second resolution. Exam questions may still reference 1 minute as the minimum for AWS service metrics.

2. In the ‘Detailed’ monitoring data available for your Amazon EBS volumes, Provisioned IOPS volumes automatically send _____ minute metrics to Amazon CloudWatch.
   1. 3
   2. 1
   3. 5
   4. 2
3. Using Amazon CloudWatch’s Free Tier, what is the frequency of metric updates, which you receive?
   1. 5 minutes
   2. 500 milliseconds.
   3. 30 seconds
   4. 1 minute
4. What is the type of monitoring data (for Amazon EBS volumes) which is available automatically in 5-minute periods at no charge called?
   1. Basic
   2. Primary
   3. Detailed
   4. Local
5. A user has created an Auto Scaling group using CLI. The user wants to enable CloudWatch detailed monitoring for that group. How can the user configure this?
   1. When the user sets an alarm on the Auto Scaling group, it automatically enables detail monitoring
   2. By default detailed monitoring is enabled for Auto Scaling (Detailed monitoring is enabled when you create the launch configuration using the AWS CLI or an API)
   3. Auto Scaling does not support detailed monitoring
   4. Enable detail monitoring from the AWS console
6. A user is trying to understand the detailed CloudWatch monitoring concept. Which of the below mentioned services provides detailed monitoring with CloudWatch without charging the user extra?
   1. AWS Auto Scaling
   2. AWS Route 53
   3. AWS EMR
   4. AWS SNS
7. A user is trying to understand the detailed CloudWatch monitoring concept. Which of the below mentioned services does not provide detailed monitoring with CloudWatch?
   1. AWS EMR (EMR sends basic metrics every 5 minutes by default; enhanced monitoring at 1-minute intervals is available starting with EMR 7.0+ via CloudWatch Agent)
   2. AWS RDS
   3. AWS ELB
   4. AWS Route53
8. A user has enabled detailed CloudWatch monitoring with the AWS Simple Notification Service. Which of the below mentioned statements helps the user understand detailed monitoring better?
   1. SNS will send data every minute after configuration
   2. There is no need to enable since SNS provides data every minute
   3. AWS CloudWatch does not support monitoring for SNS
   4. SNS cannot provide data every minute
9. A user has configured an Auto Scaling group with ELB. The user has enabled detailed CloudWatch monitoring on Auto Scaling. Which of the below mentioned statements will help the user understand the functionality better?
   1. It is not possible to setup detailed monitoring for Auto Scaling
   2. In this case, Auto Scaling will send data every minute and will charge the user extra
   3. Detailed monitoring will send data every minute without additional charges
   4. Auto Scaling sends data every minute only and does not charge the user
10. Which of the following CloudWatch monitoring features provides near real-time visibility into application performance with pre-built dashboards?
    1. CloudWatch Logs Insights
    2. CloudWatch Alarms
    3. CloudWatch Application Signals
    4. CloudWatch Contributor Insights
11. What is the minimum resolution supported by CloudWatch high-resolution custom metrics?
    1. 5 seconds
    2. 10 seconds
    3. 30 seconds
    4. 1 second
12. Which CloudWatch feature provides comprehensive database observability with fleet-level health monitoring for Amazon RDS and Aurora?
    1. CloudWatch Logs Insights
    2. Enhanced Monitoring
    3. Performance Insights
    4. CloudWatch Database Insights

References

• AWS Services that Publish CloudWatch Metrics
• Basic Monitoring and Detailed Monitoring in CloudWatch
• Publish Custom Metrics (High-Resolution)
• CloudWatch Container Insights
• CloudWatch Database Insights