CloudWatch is an invaluable tool that helps us understand the performance and health of the environment created in our AWS account. We have the ability to track and monitor our application with standard metrics, that are collected every 5 minutes at no cost. We also have the ability to enable detailed metrics for AWS services that can be reported every minute or store custom metrics that can be reported with intervals under 1 minute, down to as little as 1 second apart. As well as metrics, CloudWatch also has the ability to store and display logs. Furthermore, we can create alerts upon certain thresholds being breached and perform notifications or inform other AWS services of an event. We have also taken a look at the way we can monitor different common AWS services with CloudWatch. In the next chapter, we will understand how we can reduce the management overhead using Elastic Beanstalk.