How to: CloudWatch Tips
* Some very common use cases for CloudWatch are **[billing alarms](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/monitor_estimated_charges_with_cloudwatch.html)**, **instance** **or [load balancer up/down alarms](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/application/load-balancer-cloudwatch-metrics.html)**, and **disk usage alerts**.
* You can use [EC2Config](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/WindowsGuide/UsingConfig_WinAMI.html#send_logs_to_cwl) to monitor watch memory and disk metrics on Windows platform instances. For Linux, there are [example scripts](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/mon-scripts.html) that do the same thing.
* You can [publish your own metrics](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/publishingMetrics.html) using the AWS API. [Incurs additional cost](https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/pricing/).
* You can stream directly from CloudWatch Logs to a Lambda or ElasticSearch cluster by creating [subscriptions](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/logs/Subscriptions.html) on Log Groups.
* Don't forget to take advantage of the [CloudWatch non-expiring free tier](https://aws.amazon.com/free/#Amazon_CloudWatch).

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