CloudWatch Logs is a public service that can aggregate logs from various AWS services, but only when integration is configured properly. As its name suggests, it is a part of CloudWatch.
Log collection is achieved through:
- CWL’s integration with many AWS services (e.g., Fargate)
- CloudWatch agent for non-natively supported log sources
- Manual programmatic logging through AWS SDK
Concepts:
- metric filter: can generate metrics based on logs
- log events: timestamp + message
- log stream: log events from a single source (e.g. one EC2 instance)
- log group: groups of log streams, also stores log settings (retention, permissions), also sends data to metric filter