#amazoncloudwatch

Amazon AppSync API

Amazon AppSync Events now supports channel namespace data source connections, enabling developers to construct more complicated real-time apps. This new functionality links channel namespace handlers to AWS Lambda functions, DynamoDB tables, Aurora databases, and other data sources. AWS AppSync Events allows complex, real-time programs with data validation, event transformation, and persistent event storage.

Developers may now utilise AppSync_JS batch tools to store events in DynamoDB or use Lambda functions to create complicated event processing processes. Integration enables complex interaction processes and reduces operational overhead and development time. Without integration code, events may now be automatically saved in a database.

Start with data source integrations.

Use AWS Management Console to connect data sources. I'll choose my Event API (or create one) in the console after browsing to AWS AppSync.

Direct DynamoDB event data persistence

Data sources can be integrated in several ways. The initial sample data source will be a DynamoDB table. DynamoDB needs a new table, thus create event-messages in the console. It just needs to build the table using the Partition Key id. It may choose Create table and accept default options before returning to AppSync in the console.

Return to the Event API setup in AppSync, choose Data Sources from the tabbed navigation panel, and click Create data source.

After identifying my data source, select Amazon DynamoDB from the drop-down. This shows DynamoDB configuration options.

After setting my data source, it may apply handler logic. A DynamoDB-persisted publish handler is shown here:

Use the Namespaces tabbed menu to add the handler code to a new default namespace. Clicking the default namespace's setup information brings up the Event handler creation option.

Clicking Create event handlers opens a dialogue window for Amazon. Set Code and DynamoDB data sources to publish.

Save the handler to test console tool integration. It wrote two events to DynamoDB using default parameters.

Error handling and security

The new data source connectors provide sophisticated error handling. You can return particular error messages for synchronous operations to Amazon CloudWatch to protect clients from viewing sensitive backend data. Lambda functions can offer specific validation logic for channel or message type access in authorisation circumstances.

Now available

AWS AppSync Events now provide data source integrations in all AWS regions. You may use these new features via the AWS AppSync GUI, CLI, or SDKs. Data source connectors only cost you for Lambda invocations, DynamoDB operations, and AppSync Events.

Amazon AppSync Events

Real-time events

Create compelling user experiences You may easily publish and subscribe to real-time data updates and events like live sports scores and statistics, group chat messages, price and inventory level changes, and location and schedule updates without setting up and maintaining WebSockets infrastructure.

Public/sub channels

Simplified Pub/sub

Developers can use AppSync Event APIs by naming them and defining their default authorisation mode and channel namespace(s). All done. After that, they can publish events to runtime-specified channels immediately.

Manage events

Edit and filter messages

What is Amazon CloudWatch?

Amazon CloudWatch allows you to monitor your Amazon Web Services (AWS) apps and resources in real time. CloudWatch may be used to collect and track metrics, which are characteristics you can measure for your resources and apps.

Every AWS service you use has metrics automatically displayed on the CloudWatch home page. Additionally, you may design your own dashboards to show analytics about your own apps as well as bespoke sets of metrics of your choosing.

When a threshold is crossed, you may set up alerts that monitor metrics and send messages or that automatically modify the resources you are keeping an eye on. For instance, you may keep an eye on your Amazon EC2 instances‘ CPU utilization and disk reads and writes, and then use that information to decide whether to start more instances to accommodate the increasing strain. To save money, you may also utilize this data to halt instances that aren’t being used.

CloudWatch gives you system-wide insight into operational health, application performance, and resource usage.

How Amazon CloudWatch works

In essence, Amazon CloudWatch is a storehouse for measurements. Metrics are entered into the repository by an AWS service like Amazon EC2, and statistics are retrieved using those metrics. Statistics on your own custom metrics may also be retrieved if you add them to the repository.

Metrics may be used to compute statistics, and the CloudWatch interface can then display the data graphically.

When specific conditions are fulfilled, you may set up alert actions to stop, start, or terminate an Amazon EC2 instance. Additionally, you may set up alerts to start Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) and Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling on your behalf. See Alarms for further details on setting up CloudWatch alarms.

Resources for AWS Cloud computing are kept in highly accessible data center buildings. Each data center facility is situated in a particular geographic area, referred to as a Region, to offer extra scalability and dependability. To achieve the highest level of failure isolation and stability, each region is designed to be totally separated from the others. Although metrics are kept independently in Regions, you may combine information from many Regions using CloudWatch’s cross-Region feature.

Why Use CloudWatch?

A service called Amazon CloudWatch keeps an eye on apps, reacts to changes in performance, maximizes resource use, and offers information on the state of operations. CloudWatch provides a consistent picture of operational health, enables users to create alarms, and automatically responds to changes by gathering data from various AWS services.

Advantages Of Amazon CloudWatch

Visualize and analyze your data with end-to-end observability

Utilize robust visualization tools to gather, retrieve, and examine your resource and application data.

Operate efficiently with automation

Utilize automated actions and alerts that are programmed to trigger at preset thresholds to enhance operational effectiveness.

Quickly obtain an integrated view of your AWS or other resources

Connect with over 70 AWS services with ease for streamlined scalability and monitoring.

Proactively monitor and get actional insights to enhance end user experiences

Use relevant information from your CloudWatch dashboards’ logs and analytics to troubleshoot operational issues.

Amazon CloudWatch Use cases

Monitor application performance

To identify and fix the underlying cause of performance problems with your AWS resources, visualize performance statistics, generate alarms, and correlate data.

Perform root cause analysis

To expedite debugging and lower the total mean time to resolution, examine metrics, logs, log analytics, and user requests.

Optimize resources proactively

By establishing actions that take place when thresholds are reached according to your requirements or machine learning models, you may automate resource planning and save expenses.

Test website impacts

By looking at images, logs, and web requests at any moment, you can determine precisely when and how long your website is affected.

Use CloudWatch Application Signals to monitor serverless application performance created using AWS Lambda.

An AWS built-in application performance monitoring (APM) solution called Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals was introduced in November 2023 to address the challenge of tracking the performance of distributed systems for apps running on Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS, and Amazon EC2. Application Signals expedites troubleshooting and minimizes application downtime by automatically correlating telemetry across metrics, traces, and logs. You may increase your productivity by concentrating on the apps that support your most important business operations using CloudWatch Application Signals‘ integrated experience for performance analysis within your applications.

CloudWatch Application Signals for Lambda

In order to remove the hassles of manual setup and performance concerns associated with evaluating the health of applications for Lambda functions, AWS is announcing today that Application Signals for AWS Lambda is now available. You can now gather application golden metrics (the volume of requests coming in and going out, latency, problems, and errors) with CloudWatch Application Signals for Lambda.

By abstracting away the intricacy of the underlying infrastructure, AWS Lambda frees you from having to worry about server health and lets you concentrate on developing your application. This enables you to concentrate on keeping an eye on the functionality and health of your apps, which is essential to running them at optimal efficiency and accessibility. This necessitates having a thorough understanding of performance insights for your vital business processes and application programming interfaces (APIs), including transaction volume, latency spikes, availability dips, and mistakes.

In the past, determining the underlying cause of anomalies required a significant amount of time spent correlating disparate logs, KPIs, and traces across several tools, which increased mean time to recovery (MTTR) and operational expenses. Moreover, developing your own APM solutions using open source (OSS) libraries or custom code was laborious, complicated, costly to operate, and frequently led to longer cold start times and deployment issues when overseeing sizable fleets of Lambda functions. Without the need for manual instrumentation or code modifications from your application developers, you can now easily monitor and debug serverless application health and performance concerns with CloudWatch Application Signals.

How it works

By delving deeper into performance measurements for crucial business operations and APIs, you may quickly determine the underlying cause of performance abnormalities using CloudWatch Application Signals‘ pre-built, standardized dashboards. This aids in the visualization of the application topology, which displays how the function and its dependencies interact. To keep an eye on particular processes that are most important to you, you may also set Service Level Objectives (SLOs) on your applications. Setting a target that a webpage should render in 2000 ms 99.9 percent of the time over a rolling 28-day period is an example of a SLO.

CloudWatch Application Signals uses improved AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) modules to automatically instrument your Lambda function. You can swiftly monitor your apps with improved performance, including decreased cold start latency, memory usage, and function invocation duration.

Application Signals in the Lambda Console to gather different data on this application using an existing Lambda function called appsignals1.

You can enable the application signals and the Lambda service traces by choosing Monitoring and Operations Tools from the function’s Configuration tab.

This Lambda function is a resource that is attached to myAppSignalsApp, an application. For your application, you have established an SLO to track particular operations that are most important to you. Your objective is for the application to run within 10 ms 99.9 percent of the time within a rolling 1-day period.

After the function is called, it may take five to ten minutes for CloudWatch Application Signals to identify it. You will thus need to reload the Services page in order to view the service.

Now that you are on the Services page, you can see a list of every Lambda function that Application Signals has found for you. This is where any telemetry that is released will be seen.

Then, utilizing the newly gathered metrics of request volume, latency, faults, and failures, you can rapidly identify anomalies across your service’s various processes and dependencies and visualize the entire application topology from the Service Map. You can rapidly determine whether problems affecting end users are specific to a job or deployment by clicking into any point in time for any application metric graph to find connected traces and logs relating to that metric.

Now available

You can begin utilizing Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals for Lambda right now in any AWS Regions where both Lambda and Application Signals are accessible. Lambda functions that use Python and Node.js managed runtimes can now use Application Signals. Support for additional Lambda runtimes will be added soon.

AWS are pleased to announce today the general availability of myApplications enabling application operations, a new suite of features designed to make it easier for you to launch, manage, and grow your apps on AWS more quickly. You can more easily manage and keep an eye on the price, performance, security posture, and overall health of your AWS applications with the help of myApplication in the AWS Management Console.

You may access an Applications widget that lists the applications in an account through the Console Home, where you can also access the myApplications experience. With the new construct application wizard, connecting resources in your AWS account from a single console view makes it easier than ever to construct applications. You can interact with your generated applications by having them show up automatically in myApplications.

Key application metrics widgets are displayed in an overview format on the applications dashboard when you select your application from the Applications widget in the console. You can search, troubleshoot, and optimize your applications here.

You can take precise action on resources in the related services, including Amazon CloudWatch for application performance, AWS Cost Explorer for cost and use, and AWS Security Hub for security findings, with only one click on the apps dashboard.

How to use myApplications

To begin, select Create application from the Applications widget on the AWS Management Console Home. Enter the name and description of your application in the first stage.

You can add your resources in the following step. AWS Resource Explorer is a managed capability that makes it easier to search for and find your AWS resources across AWS Regions. You should turn it on and set it up before you can search and add resources.

To add resources to your applications, select them by choosing Add resources. Additionally, you have the option to search by tag, phrase, or Amazon CloudFormation stack to integrate resource groups and control your application’s whole lifetime.

Following confirmation, the myApplications dashboard will immediately be created, your resources will be uploaded, and new awsApplication tags will be applied.

Let’s now examine the widgets that may be helpful

You can identify which application you are working on by looking at the name, description, and tag displayed in the Application summary widget. The application’s current and projected month-end costs, the top five billed services, and a monthly application resource cost trend chart are all displayed by the Cost and consumption widget, which displays your AWS resource costs and consumption via AWS Cost Explorer. You can keep an eye on your spending, search for irregularities, and click to act when necessary.

The Compute widget displays basic metrics like Amazon EC2 instance CPU utilization and AWS Lambda invocations, together with trend charts from CloudWatch that aggregate application compute resources and information about which is alarming. You can also examine how the application functions, search for irregularities, and take appropriate action.

The Monitoring and Operations widget shows service level objectives (SLOs), standardized application performance indicators from CloudWatch Application Signals, and alarms and notifications for resources related to your application. You are able to keep an eye on current problems, evaluate patterns, and promptly locate and investigate any problems that could affect your application.

The highest priority security findings found by AWS Security Hub are displayed in the Security widget. Findings are arranged according to service and severity, allowing you to keep an eye on their security posture and click to intervene as necessary.

In order to help you determine compliance and take appropriate action, the DevOps widget compiles operational data from AWS System Manager Application Manager, including fleet management, state management, patch management, and configuration management status.

To help you with the process of reviewing and adding tags to your application, you can also utilize the Tagging widget.

Currently accessible

With the new myApplications feature, you can simply manage and monitor apps on AWS with a new application-centric interface.

The following AWS Regions have myApplications capability: Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Paris, Stockholm), Middle East (Bahrain), Asia Pacific (Hyderabad, Jakarta, Mumbai, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), South America (São Paulo), US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (N. California, Oregon), and South America (São Paulo).