# Monitor Amazon IoT alarms and metrics using Amazon CloudWatch
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You can monitor Amazon IoT using CloudWatch, which collects and processes raw data from Amazon IoT into readable, near real-time metrics. These statistics are recorded for a period of two weeks, so that you can access historical information and gain a better perspective on how your web application or service is performing. By default, Amazon IoT metric data is sent automatically to CloudWatch in one minute intervals. For more information, see [What Are Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon CloudWatch Events, and Amazon CloudWatch Logs?](https://docs.amazonaws.cn/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/DeveloperGuide/WhatIsCloudWatch.html) in the *Amazon CloudWatch User Guide*. 

## Using Amazon IoT metrics
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The metrics reported by Amazon IoT provide information that you can analyze in different ways. The following use cases are based on a scenario where you have ten things that connect to the internet once a day. Each day:
+ Ten things connect to Amazon IoT at roughly the same time.
+ Each thing subscribes to a topic filter, and then waits for an hour before disconnecting. During this period, things communicate with one another and learn more about the state of the world.
+ Each thing publishes some perception it has based on its newly found data using `UpdateThingShadow`. 
+ Each thing disconnects from Amazon IoT.

To help you get started, these topics explore some of the questions that you might have.
+  [How can I be notified if my things do not connect successfully each day?](creating_alarms.md#how_to_detect_connection_failures) 
+  [How can I be notified if my things are not publishing data each day?](creating_alarms.md#how_to_detect_publish_failures) 
+  [How can I be notified if my thing's shadow updates are being rejected each day?](creating_alarms.md#detect_rejected_updates) 
+  [How can I create a CloudWatch alarm for Jobs?](creating_alarms.md#cw-jobs-alarms) 

**Topics**
+ [Using Amazon IoT metrics](#how_to_use_metrics)
+ [Creating CloudWatch alarms to monitor Amazon IoT](creating_alarms.md)
+ [Amazon IoT metrics and dimensions](metrics_dimensions.md)