Cloud Fundamentals Course
Cloud Fundamentals
/
Intermediate

Monitoring (CloudWatch / Azure Monitor)

Definition

A comprehensive service that observes and tracks the performance, health, and resource utilization (CPU, memory, network) of your entire cloud infrastructure in real-time.

Explain Like I'm New

The dashboard of your car. It tells you how fast you are going (CPU usage), how much gas you have (Storage), and turns on a flashing red 'Check Engine' light (Alarms) if something is about to break.

Real World Example

AWS CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, GCP Cloud Monitoring. An engineer sets a CloudWatch Alarm: 'If the CPU of the web server stays above 90% for more than 5 minutes, send me a text message and automatically launch a second server.'

Common Use Cases

  • •Auto-scaling triggers
  • •Performance optimization
  • •Outage prevention

Interview Questions

basic

  • What is the primary AWS service used for monitoring CPU metrics?

intermediate

  • What is the difference between a 'Metric' and an 'Alarm'?

Flash Cards

Question

Which AWS service?

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Answer

Amazon CloudWatch.

Question

Metric vs Alarm?

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Answer

A Metric is a raw data point collected over time (e.g., 'CPU is at 45%'). An Alarm is a specific threshold rule you set (e.g., 'If CPU > 80%, send an email') that triggers an action based on those metrics.