CloudWatch Monitoring and Alarms
Publish custom metrics, build a CloudWatch dashboard, wire up SNS-backed alarms (including a composite alarm and an anomaly-detection alarm), and drive alerting from log data with a metric filter.
Prerequisites: An AWS account, AWS CLI v2 configured, and an email address you can access to confirm an SNS subscription.
CloudWatch is the metrics, logs, and alarms backbone for everything else in AWS — every service that isn't purely a one-off CLI call reports data here, and alarms are how you find out something's wrong before a customer tells you. This project covers the full loop: publish a metric, visualize it on a dashboard, alert on it through SNS, combine several alarms into one composite signal, and derive an alarm straight from log data rather than a service-emitted metric.
The mental model worth internalizing: CloudWatch Alarms don't know anything about your infrastructure — they only watch a time series and evaluate a threshold against it. Everything upstream (what metric exists, how it's calculated, how often it's published) determines whether the alarm is actually useful. Get the metric right and the alarm is trivial; get it wrong and no alarm configuration will save you.
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