Can we use CloudWatch to monitor applications outside of AWS?

Question

Let's say I have few applications on physical machines that are not part of AWS infra, is it possible for such applications to publish metrics for cloud viewing and use its notification mechanism?

The docs don't mention this case, and it seems that the CloudWatch CLI just takes the metrics as arguments and probably gets the AWS instance id and sends the metric to CloudWatch.

Answer 1

You can use CloudWatch to record custom metrics, even if your applications do not work in the AW2 EC2 infrastructure. See this blog post announcing the introduction of custom metrics (in 2011) and CloudWatch custom metrics documentation for more details.