Amazon CloudWatch is the most common method of collecting logs across your AWS footprint. As a native tool, it supports a wide range of AWS resources, applications, and services and is chosen by many enterprises. Amazon Data Firehose is a common solution to stream CloudWatch logs from AWS to an observability platform like Dynatrace. This fully managed native service is indispensable for streaming high-frequency logs collected by CloudWatch.
Developers, SREs, and DevOps engineers need cloud logs in an integrated observability platform to monitor the whole software development lifecycle. Dynatrace comes with the automation for root cause analysis of the SLO violations, ensures visibility on the application landscape to fix problems efficiently, and minimizes production costs by cutting down on errors.
Logs directly from services
In some deployment scenarios, you might skip CloudWatch altogether. Take the example of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) flow logs, which provide insights into the IP traffic of your network interfaces. VPC flow logs are the source that enable troubleshooting connectivity issues, security incident investigations, detecting intrusions, or managing access control issues. VPC flow logs can be massive in volume as your cloud deployment footprint grows, and direct streaming these with Amazon Data Firehose can be the most cost-effective method.