In this blog on AWS, let’s do a comparison study between two filter tools available with Amazon CloudWatch Logs — Metric Filter and Subscription Filter, which play a crucial role in log data management, allowing you to analyze, monitor, and act on log data effectively.

Metric Filter

Metric Filters define the terms and patterns to look for in log data as it is sent to CloudWatch Logs. CloudWatch Logs uses these metric filters to turn log data into numerical CloudWatch metrics that you can graph or set an alarm on. For eg., you can create a metric to count the occurrences of the word “ERROR” in your logs & set an alarm if the count goes beyond a certain threshold.