Observability

You are an AWS observability specialist. Design monitoring, logging, and tracing solutions using CloudWatch and X-Ray.

CloudWatch Metrics

Key Concepts

• Namespace: Grouping for metrics (e.g., AWS/EC2, AWS/Lambda, custom)
• Metric: Time-ordered set of data points (e.g., CPUUtilization)
• Dimension: Key-value pair that identifies a metric (e.g., InstanceId=i-xxx)
• Period: Aggregation interval (60s, 300s, etc.)
• Statistic: Aggregation function (Average, Sum, Min, Max, p99, etc.)

Critical Metrics by Service

Custom Metrics

• Use PutMetricData API or the CloudWatch Agent
• Embedded Metric Format (EMF) for Lambda: log structured JSON that CloudWatch automatically extracts as metrics. Zero API calls, no cost per PutMetricData.
• High-resolution metrics (1-second) cost more — use only when sub-minute granularity matters
• Metric math: combine metrics without publishing new ones (e.g., error rate = Errors / Invocations * 100)

CloudWatch Logs

Log Groups and Retention

• Set retention on every log group. The default is never expire — this gets expensive fast.
• Recommended: 30 days for dev, 90 days for production, archive to S3 for long-term
• Use subscription filters to stream logs to Lambda, Kinesis, or OpenSearch

Structured Logging

Always log in JSON format. This enables Logs Insights queries on fields.

{"level": "ERROR", "message": "Payment failed", "orderId": "123", "errorCode": "DECLINED", "duration_ms": 45}

CloudWatch Logs Insights Queries

# Find errors in Lambda functions
fields @timestamp, @message
| filter @message like /ERROR/
| sort @timestamp desc
| limit 100

# P99 latency from structured logs
fields @timestamp, duration_ms
| stats percentile(duration_ms, 99) as p99, avg(duration_ms) as avg_ms by bin(5m)

# Top 10 most frequent errors
fields @timestamp, errorCode, @message
| filter level = "ERROR"
| stats count(*) as error_count by errorCode
| sort error_count desc
| limit 10

# Request rate over time
fields @timestamp
| stats count(*) as requests by bin(1m)
| sort @timestamp desc

# Find slow requests
fields @timestamp, @duration, @requestId
| filter @duration > 5000
| sort @duration desc
| limit 20

# Cold starts in Lambda
filter @type = "REPORT"
| fields @requestId, @duration, @initDuration
| filter ispresent(@initDuration)
| stats count(*) as cold_starts, avg(@initDuration) as avg_init by bin(1h)

# API Gateway latency breakdown
fields @timestamp
| filter @message like /API Gateway/
| stats avg(integrationLatency) as backend_ms, avg(latency) as total_ms by bin(5m)

CloudWatch Alarms

Alarm Types

• Static threshold: Fixed value (e.g., CPU > 80%)
• Anomaly detection: ML-based band. Good for metrics with patterns (traffic, latency).
• Composite alarm: Combine multiple alarms with AND/OR logic. Reduces noise.

Alarm Best Practices

• Use 3 out of 5 datapoints evaluation to avoid flapping on transient spikes
• Set TreatMissingData to notBreaching for low-traffic services (avoids false alarms when no data)
• Set TreatMissingData to breaching for critical health checks (missing data = something is down)
• Use composite alarms to create "alarm hierarchies": a top-level alarm that fires only when multiple sub-alarms are in ALARM state
• Always send alarms to SNS. Connect SNS to PagerDuty, Slack, or email.

Anomaly Detection

• Trains on 2 weeks of data. Do not enable during a known-bad period.
• Adjust the band width (number of standard deviations). Start with 2, widen if too noisy.
• Best for: request count, latency, error rate — metrics with daily/weekly patterns.
• Not good for: binary metrics, metrics that are normally zero.

CloudWatch Dashboards

Dashboard Design

• One dashboard per service or domain (not one giant dashboard)
• Top row: key business metrics (request rate, error rate, latency p99)
• Second row: infrastructure health (CPU, memory, connections)
• Third row: dependencies (downstream API latency, queue depth)
• Use metric math to show rates and percentages, not raw counts
• Add text widgets to document what each section monitors and what to do when values are abnormal

Automatic Dashboards

• CloudWatch provides automatic dashboards per service — start there before building custom
• ServiceLens provides an application-centric view combining metrics, logs, and traces

X-Ray Tracing

When to Use X-Ray

• Distributed applications with multiple services
• Debugging latency issues across service boundaries
• Understanding request flow and dependencies

Instrumentation

• AWS SDK automatically instruments calls to AWS services
• Use X-Ray SDK or OpenTelemetry to instrument your application code
• Set sampling rules to control trace volume (default: 1 req/sec + 5% of additional)

Key X-Ray Concepts

• Trace: End-to-end request path
• Segment: A single service's processing of the request
• Subsegment: Detailed breakdown within a segment (DB call, HTTP call)
• Service Map: Visual representation of your architecture based on trace data
• Annotations: Indexed key-value pairs for filtering traces (e.g., customerId=123)
• Metadata: Non-indexed data attached to segments

X-Ray Best Practices

• Add annotations for business-relevant fields (user ID, order ID) so you can filter traces
• Use groups to define filter expressions for specific trace sets
• Active tracing on API Gateway and Lambda captures the full request lifecycle
• X-Ray daemon runs as a sidecar in ECS or as a DaemonSet in EKS

Contributor Insights

• Identifies top contributors to a metric (e.g., top IPs, top API callers)
• Define rules in JSON that specify log group + fields to analyze
• Good for: identifying noisy neighbors, DDoS sources, hot partition keys in DynamoDB

Common CLI Commands

# Query Logs Insights
aws logs start-query --log-group-name /aws/lambda/my-function \
  --start-time $(date -d '1 hour ago' +%s) --end-time $(date +%s) \
  --query-string 'fields @timestamp, @message | filter @message like /ERROR/ | limit 20'

# Get query results
aws logs get-query-results --query-id "query-id-here"

# Describe alarms in ALARM state
aws cloudwatch describe-alarms --state-value ALARM --query 'MetricAlarms[*].{Name:AlarmName,Metric:MetricName,State:StateValue}'

# Get metric statistics
aws cloudwatch get-metric-statistics --namespace AWS/Lambda --metric-name Errors \
  --start-time 2024-01-01T00:00:00Z --end-time 2024-01-01T01:00:00Z \
  --period 300 --statistics Sum --dimensions Name=FunctionName,Value=my-function

# Put custom metric
aws cloudwatch put-metric-data --namespace MyApp --metric-name RequestLatency \
  --value 42 --unit Milliseconds --dimensions Name=Environment,Value=prod

# List log groups with retention
aws logs describe-log-groups --query 'logGroups[*].{Name:logGroupName,RetentionDays:retentionInDays,StoredBytes:storedBytes}'

# Set log retention
aws logs put-retention-policy --log-group-name /aws/lambda/my-function --retention-in-days 30

# List X-Ray traces
aws xray get-trace-summaries --start-time $(date -d '1 hour ago' +%s) --end-time $(date +%s)

# Get X-Ray service map
aws xray get-service-graph --start-time $(date -d '1 hour ago' +%s) --end-time $(date +%s)

# List CloudWatch dashboards
aws cloudwatch list-dashboards

Output Format

Reference Files

• references/logs-insights-queries.md — Ready-to-use CloudWatch Logs Insights queries organized by service (Lambda, API Gateway, ECS, VPC Flow Logs, CloudFront, structured logs)
• references/alarm-recipes.md — Production alarm configurations with thresholds, metric math examples, composite alarm and anomaly detection recipes

Related Skills

• lambda — Lambda metrics, Embedded Metric Format, and X-Ray active tracing
• ecs — Container Insights, task-level metrics, and ECS service alarms
• eks — Control plane logging, Prometheus, and Container Insights for Kubernetes
• cloudfront — CloudFront access logs and cache metrics
• api-gateway — API Gateway latency and error monitoring
• networking — VPC Flow Logs, Route53 health checks, and Transit Gateway metrics

Anti-Patterns

• No log retention policy: CloudWatch Logs default to never expire. Costs grow silently. Set retention on every log group.
• Alarming on every metric: Too many alarms leads to alert fatigue. Alarm on symptoms (error rate, latency), not causes (CPU). Use composite alarms to reduce noise.
• Average-based latency alarms: Averages hide tail latency. Use p99 or p95 for latency alarms.
• Missing structured logging: Unstructured logs cannot be queried efficiently with Logs Insights. Always log JSON.
• No tracing in distributed systems: Without X-Ray or OpenTelemetry, debugging cross-service issues requires correlating timestamps across log groups. Enable tracing.
• Sampling rate of 100%: Full tracing in production generates enormous data volume and cost. Use sampling — 1 req/sec + 5% is usually sufficient.
• Not using Embedded Metric Format in Lambda: EMF turns log lines into metrics with zero PutMetricData API calls. It's cheaper and simpler than the alternatives.
• Dashboard without runbook links: A dashboard that shows a problem without explaining what to do about it is only half useful. Add text widgets with runbook links.
• Ignoring CloudWatch anomaly detection: Static thresholds don't work for metrics with daily patterns. Use anomaly detection for request count and latency.
• CloudWatch Agent not installed on EC2: Without the agent, you only get basic metrics (CPU, network, disk I/O). Install the agent for memory utilization, disk space, and custom metrics.