AWS Observability Tools for Different Use Cases

AWS offers a comprehensive suite of observability tools to gain insights into your applications and infrastructure. The right tools depend on your specific use case and requirements.

Monitoring AWS Infrastructure

For basic infrastructure monitoring, Amazon CloudWatch is a good choice. It can collect metrics from AWS resources like EC2 instances, RDS databases, Lambda functions, etc. Some features:

• Collect CPU, memory, and network metrics
• Set alarms to trigger notifications when metrics pass thresholds
• Create dashboards to visualize metrics

CloudWatch is a good option if you need:

• Simple monitoring of AWS resources
• Alarms and notifications when issues arise
• Basic dashboards for quick visibility

Monitoring Containers

If you have containerized workloads running on ECS or EKS, Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights is a useful tool. It provides:

• Monitoring of container-level metrics like CPU and memory usage
• Application-level metrics like request counts and error rates
• Dashboards and alarms specific to container workloads

Container Insights is helpful for:

• Gaining visibility into container performance
• Detecting bottlenecks and issues in containerized applications
• Setting container-specific alerts and notifications

Distributed Tracing

For distributed tracing across microservices, AWS X-Ray is a powerful option. It can:

• Trace requests as they move through distributed applications
• Aggregate and correlate traces from multiple services
• Identify bottlenecks and latency issues

X-Ray is useful for:

• Troubleshooting performance problems in distributed systems
• Analyzing request flows and identifying outliers
• Improving application performance and efficiency

Open-Source Observability

For more advanced observability, open-source tools like Prometheus and Grafana integrate well with AWS. Managed services like:

• Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus
• Amazon Managed Grafana

Provide these benefits:

• Collect metrics from AWS and on-premises systems
• Set complex alerting rules based on metrics
• Visualize metrics and traces using customizable dashboards

Open-source tools are useful for:

• Granular and customizable monitoring
• Correlating metrics, traces, and logs
• Advanced alerting based on multiple data sources

In summary, the right AWS observability tools depend on your specific monitoring needs, workload types, and desired capabilities. AWS provides native tools, managed services, and integrations with open-source solutions to suit a range of use cases.

Sources

1. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mt/best-practices-implementing-observability-with-aws/
2. https://aws.amazon.com/cloudops/monitoring-and-observability/
3. https://www.mezmo.com/learn-observability/the-top-tools-for-aws-observability