Using Contributor Insights to analyze high-cardinality data

You can use Contributor Insights to analyze log data and create time series that display contributor data. You can see metrics about the top-N contributors, the total number of unique contributors, and their usage. This helps you find top talkers and understand who or what is impacting system performance. For example, you can find bad hosts, identify the heaviest network users, or find the URLs that generate the most errors.

You can build your rules from scratch, and when you use the Amazon Web Services Management Console you can also use sample rules that Amazon has created. Rules define the log fields that you want to use to define contributors, such as IpAddress. You can also filter the log data to find and analyze the behavior of individual contributors.

CloudWatch also provides built-in rules that you can use to analyze metrics from other Amazon services.

All rules analyze incoming data in real time.

If you are signed in to an account that is set up as a monitoring account in CloudWatch cross-account observability, you can create Contributor Insights rules in that monitoring account that analyze log groups in source accounts and in the monitoring account. You can also create a single rule that analyzes log groups in multiple accounts. For more information, see CloudWatch cross-account observability.