Amazon CloudWatch introduces a new CloudWatch Agent with AWS Systems Manager Integration for Unified Metrics and Logs Collection
The new CloudWatch Agent, integrated with AWS Systems Manager (SSM) for simplified deployment and management, unifies collecting multi-platform metrics and logs into one agent and enhances the observability of your EC2 instances and virtual machines by collecting in-guest system metrics. Using SSM Run Command or State Manager, you can deploy the agent on EC2 instances, on-premise servers, or hybrid environments, for collecting both Linux and Windows OS metrics and logs, including Windows performance counters and event logs.
The new CloudWatch Agent, integrated with AWS Systems Manager (SSM) for simplified deployment and management, unifies collecting multi-platform metrics and logs into one agent and enhances the observability of your EC2 instances and virtual machines by collecting in-guest system metrics. Using SSM Run Command or State Manager, you can deploy the agent on EC2 instances, on-premise servers, or hybrid environments, for collecting both Linux and Windows OS metrics and logs, including Windows performance counters and event logs.
With the agent, you can customize or select from multiple default configurations to collect system-level metrics including disk, memory, and more, with the option to collect at a sub-resource level, such as per disk metrics. Similar to default EC2 metrics, these system-level metrics can be used with CloudWatch alarms for autoscaling instances when available memory is low, dashboarding the p99 statistic of network I/O, and more.
The agent automatically appends EC2 dimensions for contextual information, such as Auto Scaling Group Name. You can add custom dimensions, configure aggregate metrics, and customize metric resolution, with support down to 1-second resolution. You can also collect both Linux and Windows logs using the same CloudWatch agent. Customers currently using the SSM Agent or EC2Config with CloudWatch can migrate over to the new agent via a SSM migration run command.
The CloudWatch agent is available in all AWS public regions, with AWS GovCloud and China regions to follow.
Get started with the CloudWatch agent by downloading directly from the AWS SSM console or via CLI from our S3 bucket for standalone installs. To learn more, please visit the CloudWatch agent and SSM migration user guides. The agent is free to use and follows standard CloudWatch logs and custom metrics pricing.