CloudWatch
Last updated: Nov 3, 2026
Rationale
Fluid Attacks uses CloudWatch for the monitoring of all its AWS infrastructure. With it, Fluid Attacks can monitor its applications, react to performance changes in them, make the use of resources better, and get one view of the operational health. These are the primary reasons why Fluid Attacks selected it and not other alternatives:
- It is a core AWS service. When Fluid Attacks makes infrastructure, CloudWatch starts to monitor it.
- It integrates easily with most AWS services, for example, EC2, S3, and DynamoDB.
- It complies with many certifications from ISO and CSA. Many of these certifications make sure that the entity uses best practices for secure cloud-based environments and information security.
- It supports custom dashboards that show metrics with bar charts, pie charts, numbers, and more. You can also change other items, for example, timespans and resource metrics as axes.
- It supports alarms with AWS SNS. These alarms send email notifications when the resource metric conditions are not true or when CloudWatch finds anomalies.
- You can write the resources as code with Terraform.
Alternatives
GCP Cloud Monitoring and Azure Monitor are alternatives that were not available when Fluid Attacks moved to the cloud. The review of each of them is pending.
Usage
Fluid Attacks uses CloudWatch to monitor these items:
- EC2 instance performance
- EBS disk usage and performance
- S3 bucket storage and number of objects
- ELB load balancer performance
- DynamoDB table usage and performance
- SQS sent, delayed, received, and deleted messages
- ECS cluster resource reservation and utilization
- Lambda invocations, errors, duration, and more
Fluid Attacks also defines alarms as code with Terraform for one component: two alarms monitor the queues of the GitLab bot. These alarms send email notifications through SNS.
Fluid Attacks does not use these CloudWatch functions:
- Synthetic monitoring: Fluid Attacks uses Checkly.
- ServiceLens: It supports only Lambda functions, API Gateway, and Java-based applications.
- Contributor Insights: Fluid Attacks uses Cloudflare.
- Container Insights: Fluid Attacks uses Datadog.
- Lambda Insights: Its review is pending.
- CloudWatch agent: It can possibly show more about EC2 machines. Its review is pending.
- CloudWatch Application Insights: It supports only Java-based applications.