Introduction

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It allows users to collect, track, and analyze various metrics from their cloud infrastructure and applications. Two fundamental concepts in CloudWatch are namespaces and metric collection. Understanding these concepts is crucial for effectively monitoring and managing resources in AWS.

CloudWatch Namespaces

What are Namespaces?

Namespaces in CloudWatch are containers for metrics that help organize and isolate different sets of metrics from one another. They serve as a way to group related metrics together, making it easier to manage and query them. Almost every AWS services’ namespaces are included in CloudWatch Namespaces.

Key Features of Namespaces

• Isolation: Each namespace is isolated from others, preventing naming conflicts between metrics from different sources.
• Hierarchical Structure: Namespaces use a hierarchical naming convention, typically in the format "AWS/Service" for AWS services.
• Custom Namespaces: Users can create custom namespaces for their own applications or services.

Common AWS Namespaces

Some commonly used AWS namespaces include:

• AWS/EC2: For Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud metrics
• AWS/RDS: For Amazon Relational Database Service metrics
• AWS/Lambda: For AWS Lambda function metrics
• AWS/ELB: For Elastic Load Balancing metrics
• AWS/ELB: For Elastic Load Balancing metrics

Metric Collection