cloudwatch_skill

Overview

This skill provides practical AWS CloudWatch monitoring and observability workflows for logs, metrics, alarms, and dashboards. It focuses on creating alarms, querying logs with Insights, configuring metric filters, publishing custom metrics, and building dashboards to troubleshoot and optimize applications. Use it to speed up setup and operational tasks with CLI and boto3 examples.

How this skill works

The skill inspects CloudWatch concepts and common operational patterns, then generates concrete commands and code snippets to implement them (CLI and boto3). It covers creating metric alarms, composite or expression-based alarms, running Logs Insights queries, creating metric filters from log patterns, publishing custom metrics, and assembling dashboards. It also highlights troubleshooting checks and cost-optimization tips to quickly diagnose issues like missing metrics or stuck alarms.

When to use it

• Setting up monitoring for EC2, Lambda, RDS, or custom applications
• Creating alarms for CPU, error rate, latency, or composite conditions
• Querying logs with Logs Insights to find recent errors or patterns
• Extracting metrics from logs via metric filters and publishing custom metrics
• Building dashboards to correlate metrics and recent log activity

Best practices

• Use dimensions sparingly to avoid metric explosion and high cardinality
• Aggregate and batch custom metrics to reduce API calls and cost
• Prefer structured JSON logs for reliable parsing and metric extraction
• Set appropriate evaluation periods and use anomaly detection to avoid flapping
• Apply retention policies and remove unused dashboards to control costs

Example use cases

• Create an EC2 CPU utilization alarm with SNS notifications and OK actions
• Build a Lambda error-rate alarm using metric math (errors/invocations*100)
• Run a Logs Insights query to list recent ERROR messages from a Lambda
• Add a metric filter that increments ErrorCount when logs contain 'ERROR'
• Publish OrdersProcessed as a custom metric with Environment and OrderType dimensions