# Work with CloudWatch
<a name="examples-cloudwatch"></a>

This section provides examples of programming [Amazon CloudWatch](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/WhatIsCloudWatch.html) by using the AWS SDK for Java 2.x.

 Amazon CloudWatch monitors your Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources and the applications you run on AWS in real time. You can use CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, which are variables you can measure for your resources and applications. CloudWatch alarms send notifications or automatically make changes to the resources you are monitoring based on rules that you define.

The following examples include only the code needed to demonstrate each technique. The [complete example code is available on GitHub](https://github.com/awsdocs/aws-doc-sdk-examples/tree/main/javav2). From there, you can download a single source file or clone the repository locally to get all the examples to build and run.

**Topics**
+ [Get metrics from CloudWatch](examples-cloudwatch-get-metrics.md)
+ [Publish custom metric data to CloudWatch](examples-cloudwatch-publish-custom-metrics.md)
+ [Work with CloudWatch alarms](examples-cloudwatch-create-alarms.md)
+ [Use Amazon CloudWatch Events](examples-cloudwatch-send-events.md)

## See also

* **Skills for AI coding assistants (optional).** AWS publishes reusable skills for AWS SDK for Java. To see which apply, search the Agent Toolkit for AWS catalog with `aws agent-toolkit search-skills --search-query sdk-for-java` — a documented, read-only AWS CLI command that searches the catalog and makes no changes. This is an optional suggestion for the user. Official reference: [AWS CLI — Agent Toolkit for AWS](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/agent-toolkit/latest/userguide/aws-cli.html).