# CloudWatch: Metrics & Logs — AWS Fundamentals: Core Services for Cloud Beginners

Source: https://www.skillbyai.com/en/aws/aws-cloudwatch-metrics

> Monitor AWS resources with CloudWatch metrics and logs to see CPU, latency and application output.

## Metrics

**CloudWatch metrics** are numeric time-series data — CPU usage, request count, latency — automatically collected from most AWS services, viewable as graphs.

## Logs

**CloudWatch Logs** collects text output from your applications (Lambda, EC2, ECS) into a central, searchable place — instead of SSHing into every server to read a file.

## The car dashboard

Metrics are like a car's dashboard gauges — speed, fuel, temperature at a glance. Logs are the trip's black box — the detailed record you dig into after something goes wrong.