Implement Advanced CloudWatch Monitoring for a Web Server

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Implement Advanced CloudWatch Monitoring for a Web Server

CloudWatch Logs centralizes the logs from all of your systems, applications, and AWS services that you use, in a single, highly scalable service. In this lab, you will configure an EC2 instance to stream its Apache web server error logs to CloudWatch Logs. You will configure the agent and then log in to the CloudWatch Logs console to make sure the logs are streamed correctly. By the end of this lab, you will understand how to install the CloudWatch Logs agent and configure it to stream a log to the service.

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Lab Info

Level

Beginner

Last updated

Sep 24, 2025

Duration

30m

Challenge

Download and Run the CloudWatch Logs Installer

Please give the lab an extra few minutes before connecting to webserver-01. Connect to the webserver-01 instance, and install the CloudWatch Logs agent:

wget -O awslogs-agent-setup.py https://s3.amazonaws.com/aws-cloudwatch/downloads/latest/awslogs-agent-setup.py

sudo python ./awslogs-agent-setup.py --region us-east-1
Challenge

Configure CloudWatch Logs

Follow the prompts to configure CloudWatch Logs, including opening the IAM console to generate an access key and secret key.

Copy and paste the below path for the log file to upload: /var/log/apache2/error.log
Challenge

Log In to the CloudWatch Logs Website

Open the CloudWatch Logs website to observe if the log has streamed correctly.

You can also view the contents of the error log to compare with AWS CloudWatch Logs in the CLI on the web server by issuing the command: sudo cat /var/log/apache2/error.log

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