CloudWatch Agent

• There are two types of CloudWatch Agents:

  • CloudWatch Logs Agent - Older version with less logging capabilities.

  • CloudWatch Unified Agent - Newer version with features such as additional metrics and centralized management with SSM parameter store.

• The unified CloudWatch agent enables you to do the following:

  • Collect more system-level metrics from Amazon EC2 instances across operating systems.

  • Collect system-level metrics from on-premises servers.

    • These can include servers in a hybrid environment as well as servers not managed by AWS.

  • Retrieve custom metrics from your applications or services.

• You can store and view the metrics that you collect with the CloudWatch agent in CloudWatch just as you can with any other CloudWatch metrics.