About Amazon CloudWatch Agent
The Amazon CloudWatch Agent enables you to do the following:
- Collect more system-level metrics from Amazon EC2 instances across operating systems. The metrics can include in-guest metrics, in addition to the metrics for EC2 instances. The additional metrics that can be collected are listed in Metrics Collected by the CloudWatch Agent.
- 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 using the StatsD and collectd protocols. StatsD is supported on both Linux servers and servers running Windows Server. collectd is supported only on Linux servers.
- Collect logs from Amazon EC2 instances and on-premises servers, running either Linux or Windows Server.
- Collect Open Telemetry and AWS X-Ray traces
Amazon CloudWatch Agent uses open-source projects telegraf and opentelemetry-collector as its dependencies. It operates by starting an opentelemetry collector and is capable of operating pipelines consisting of both telegraf and opentemetry components in addition to customized components.
