While third-party services can be used for observability and monitoring of AWS resources, AWS also provides native support for observability and monitoring. In this article, we’ll examine the AWS observability and monitoring services. Note, the following services can be used standalone, or together with other observability and monitoring solutions.
Amazon CloudWatch
CloudWatch equips you with data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health. Logs from most AWS services can be easily sent and integrated with CloudWatch with minimum setup. These Logs are automatically organized by resource type, leading to improved discoverability on the backend. For applications running in AWS, the application logic requires minimal to no change for CloudWatch implementation, and traditional logging methods can be used.
AWS X-Ray
X-Ray helps analyze and debug distributed applications, such as those built using microservices and serverless architectures. It can track user requests through services in the application to get a complete view of a request’s life cycle and identify bottlenecks within the system.
AWS CloudTrail
CloudTrail enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of AWS accounts and organizations. CloudTrail logs are used to establish compliance with regulations such as SOC, PCI, and HIPAA. These logs are set up to record user activity and events in applications.
AWS Config
With AWS Config, you’ll get a detailed inventory of your AWS resources, configuration history, and configuration change notifications. As a result, you can enable security analysis, resource change tracking, and compliance auditing. Config can be used to continually monitor and analyze AWS resource configurations and their updates for potential security vulnerabilities and compliance purposes.
The Botton Line / TLDR
Knowing about these AWS resources is half the battle. You’ll also need to know how to implement and when to use them. At Uplancer, we work closely with our partners to implement observability and monitoring tools through an AWS-approved well-architected framework for optimizing their cloud infrastructures. We also do consultations to build out a total solution around observability and monitoring. Connect with our team today to get started!
