Ravindra BagaleCourses & study guides

Chapter 14: Logging and Light Observability

14.4 Primary path — CloudWatch Logs

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This course's primary logging path for cloud labs: ship or query logs with Amazon CloudWatch Logs when you practise on AWS.

Why pick CloudWatch here?

  1. Students already use AWS for VMs in the companion course.
  2. One account console covers metrics (ch13 secondary mention) and logs.
  3. You learn the universal idea: central store + search + retention — transferable to other stacks.

ELK briefly (secondary): Elasticsearch + Logstash/Beats + Kibana (or OpenSearch variants) is a popular self-managed/searchable stack many companies still run. Same mental model: agents ship logs → index → search UI. We do not dual-build ELK and CloudWatch in this chapter — pick CloudWatch for the lab pathway; know ELK exists for interviews.

We do not invent CloudWatch pricing, free-tier quotas or retention defaults. Read current AWS documentation for limits and cost behaviour; stop idle labs.

  App / Docker / journal
         │ ship or agent
         ▼
  CloudWatch Log Group → Log Streams
         │
         ▼
   Filter / Logs Insights query → incident note