How AWS helps detect and resolve system issues faster?

In today’s world, where IT systems are becoming increasingly complex and infrastructure is more often migrating to the cloud, understanding the state of system operations is key to achieving operational excellence and fulfilling business goals. In this article, we’ll explore what observability in the AWS cloud really means and the benefits it can bring.

What is observability?

Observability is the ability to monitor and analyze internal processes within applications and infrastructure – plays a crucial role. By collecting metrics and logs, it becomes possible not only to quickly detect and resolve issues but also to define and measure key performance indicators (KPIs) and service level objectives (SLOs).

Foundations of observability in Amazon Web Services

Observability in AWS is built on three main pillars: monitoring, tracing, and logging. The focus should be on collecting, visualizing, alerting, and analyzing metrics and logs. A key tool in this process is Amazon CloudWatch, which allows centralized collection of system performance data. AWS automatically provides basic metrics for many services such as Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS, which serves as a great starting point for building effective infrastructure monitoring.

Amazon CloudWatch also features a “Logs” module, which enables centralized collection of logs from all workloads in one place. This allows for easy searching, filtering by specific fields, and secure archiving for future analysis. For example, logs from selected applications and services running on EC2 instances can be collected using the CloudWatch Agent, which can be installed via AWS Systems Manager.

Once metrics and logs are gathered, they can be visualized and used to create alarms in CloudWatch that notify about threshold breaches. Importantly, you can also create custom metrics based on log patterns, which count occurrences of specific strings within a set time frame. This enables the creation of alarms sensitive to specific log entries in an application. For broader observability, CloudWatch Dashboards can be used to build visual dashboards encompassing the entire infrastructure-even across multiple AWS regions.

Advanced observability in AWS

Basic observability in AWS already offers tremendous capabilities, but it can be taken a step further, especially regarding logs. Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights enables interactive log data analysis, allowing faster detection and resolution of operational issues and reducing mean time to recovery (MTTR). Meanwhile, Contributor Insights helps identify main sources of traffic or issues, such as the most overloaded hosts.

To ensure full observability in increasingly distributed environments, it’s essential to implement transaction tracing. AWS X-Ray enables the collection of trace data from both custom applications and integrated AWS services. In many cases, deploying X-Ray requires only basic configuration.

It’s also worth integrating logs with trace data using trace IDs to gain a more complete view of system behavior. Amazon CloudWatch ServiceLens enables visualization of application operations in a holistic view, combining metrics, logs, and traces into one integrated dashboard. This accelerates detection of performance and error issues, improving response time and user experience.

Too many alarms can become overwhelming, and not every alert requires action. That’s why AWS offers a feature called Composite Alarms, which lets you define dependencies between multiple alarms so they only trigger when specific complex conditions are met. This helps reduce false positives and ensures focus on truly critical incidents.

What else is worth exploring in AWS observability?

AWS services provide a wide range of features supporting monitoring and observability. One of them is CloudWatch Lambda Insights, particularly useful in serverless and container-based environments. It collects system metrics for Lambda functions, helping to identify performance issues like cold starts. Meanwhile, CloudWatch Container Insights offers detailed insights into container and microservice performance, including resource usage and restart errors. Both tools significantly reduce the time needed to detect and resolve issues in modern cloud environments.

For web application administrators, CloudWatch Real User Monitoring (RUM) can be invaluable. This tool collects data from real user sessions, such as page load times, client-side errors, and user navigation paths. These insights help diagnose problems faster and better understand user experiences, enabling quicker adjustments to meet real-world user needs.

In the database realm, Amazon RDS Performance Insights proves to be a powerful tool. It allows monitoring and analysis of database performance for Amazon RDS and Aurora. It helps identify bottlenecks through an interactive view of database load and shows, for instance, which SQL queries most affect performance. Performance Insights also integrates with Amazon CloudWatch, enabling alarm creation based on performance data.

Summary of observability in AWS

Implementing all three pillars of observability—logs, metrics, and monitoring – enables effective diagnostics and immediate identification of root causes. Amazon Web Services offers many ready-to-use tools dedicated to observability, such as Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray. These robust solutions allow you to implement observability in a fast and scalable way, ultimately improving user experience.

Would you like to implement full-featured observability that meets all the needs and requirements of your cloud environment? Contact our specialists now at kontakt@lcloud.pl!