Amazon CloudWatch collects raw data from partnered AWS services such as Amazon EC2 and then processes the information into readable, near real-time metrics. These statistics are recorded for a period of two weeks, allowing you access to historical information and providing you with a better perspective on how your web application or service is performing.

This section describes how to enable monitoring on a new instance and how to enable monitoring on a running instance. For detailed information about Amazon CloudWatch, refer to the Amazon CloudWatch Developer Guide.