Infrastructure security in Amazon CloudWatch - Amazon CloudWatch
Network isolation
Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Infrastructure security in Amazon CloudWatch

As a managed service, Amazon CloudWatch is protected by Amazon global network security. For information about Amazon security services and how Amazon protects infrastructure, see Amazon Cloud Security. To design your Amazon environment using the best practices for infrastructure security, see Infrastructure Protection in Security Pillar Amazon Well‐Architected Framework.

You use Amazon published API calls to access CloudWatch through the network. Clients must support the following:

  • Transport Layer Security (TLS). We require TLS 1.2 and recommend TLS 1.3.

  • Cipher suites with perfect forward secrecy (PFS) such as DHE (Ephemeral Diffie-Hellman) or ECDHE (Elliptic Curve Ephemeral Diffie-Hellman). Most modern systems such as Java 7 and later support these modes.

Additionally, requests must be signed by using an access key ID and a secret access key that is associated with an IAM principal. Or you can use the Amazon Security Token Service (Amazon STS) to generate temporary security credentials to sign requests.

Network isolation

A virtual private cloud (VPC) is a virtual network in your own logically isolated area in the Amazon Web Services Cloud. A subnet is a range of IP addresses in a VPC. You can deploy a variety of Amazon resources in the subnets of your VPCs. For example, you can deploy Amazon EC2 instances, EMR clusters, and DynamoDB tables in subnets. For more information, see the Amazon VPC User Guide.

To enable CloudWatch to communicate with resources in a VPC without going through the public internet, use Amazon PrivateLink. For more information, see Using CloudWatch and CloudWatch Synthetics with interface VPC endpoints.

A private subnet is a subnet with no default route to the public internet. Deploying an Amazon resource in a private subnet does not prevent Amazon CloudWatch from collecting built-in metrics from the resource.

If you need to publish custom metrics from an Amazon resource in a private subnet, you can do so using a proxy server. The proxy server forwards those HTTPS requests to the public API endpoints for CloudWatch.