Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals, for application monitoring (APM) is generally available

Posted on: Jun 10, 2024

Today, AWS announces the general availability of Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals, an OpenTelemetry (OTeL) compatible application performance monitoring (APM) feature in CloudWatch, that makes it easy to automatically instrument and track application performance against their most important business or service level objectives (SLOs) for applications on AWS. With no manual effort, no custom code, and no custom dashboards, Application Signals provides service operators with a pre-built, standardized dashboard showing the most important metrics for application performance – volume, availability, latency, faults, and errors – for each of their applications on AWS.

By correlating telemetry across metrics, traces, logs, real-user monitoring, and synthetic monitoring, Application Signals enables customers to speed up troubleshooting and reduce application disruption. For example, an application developer operating a payment processing application can see if payment processing latency is spiking and drill into the precisely correlated trace contributing to the spike to establish cause in application code or dependency. Developers that use Container Insights to monitor container infrastructure, can further identify root cause such as a memory shortage or a high CPU utilization on the container pod running the application code causing the spike.

Application Signals is generally available in 28 commercial AWS Regions, except CA West (Calgary) Region, AWS GovCloud (US) Regions and China Regions. For pricing, see Amazon CloudWatch pricing.

Try Application Signals with the AWS One Observability Workshop sample application. To learn more, see documentation to enable Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals for Amazon EKS, Amazon EC2, native Kubernetes and custom instrumentation for other platforms.