AWS Cloud Operations Blog

Rich McDonough

Author: Rich McDonough

Rich McDonough is a Sr. WW Cloud Operations Specialist Solutions Architect for AWS based in Toronto. His primary focus is on observability and helping customers scale their use of AWS safely and securely. Before joining AWS in 2018, he specialized in helping migrate customers into the cloud. Rich loves helping customers learn about AWS CloudFormation, AWS Config, and AWS Control Tower, and all things related to CloudWatch.

Observe your Azure and AWS workloads simultaneously with Amazon CloudWatch

Observe your Azure and AWS workloads simultaneously with Amazon CloudWatch

Overview Effective operation of cloud applications and services demands a strong focus on monitoring and observability. It’s critical for your teams to define, capture, and analyze metrics, ensuring operational visibility and extracting actionable insights from logs. In many companies, technical teams share integrated systems to monitor the services or infrastructure they manage. Shared observability systems […]

Quantify custom application metrics with Amazon CloudWatch Logs and metric filters

Customers have valuable metrics emitted to their logs. Examples include web server response times, slow queries, purchases by partners, custom application metrics, and cache hits or misses. This data has unrealized potential value for increasing observability. Consumed by Amazon CloudWatch Logs and extracted using metric filters, customers can translate this data into actual CloudWatch metrics, […]

How to search through your AWS Systems Manager Session Manager console logs – Part 1

AWS Systems Manager (SSM) in combination with AWS Key Management Services (KMS), Amazon CloudWatch, and Amazon OpenSearch allow administrators to encrypt and securely store user session logs, as well as search the log data for information. These tools are easy to integrate and provide powerful analytical capabilities without the undifferentiated heavy lifting. In this series, […]

How to search through your AWS Systems Manager Session Manager console logs – Part 2

AWS System Manager in combination with Amazon Key Management Services (KMS), Amazon CloudWatch, and Amazon Open Search can provide administrators with the ability to encrypt and securely store user session logs and search the log data for information. These tools are easy to integrate and provide powerful analytical capabilities without undifferentiated heavy lifting. In the […]

An Observability Journey with Amazon CloudWatch RUM, Evidently, and ServiceLens

Observability means more than just monitoring. At AWS, we consider observability to be an integral component of healthy and secure operations. Two of the newest features of Amazon CloudWatch that enhance observability into your application’s health and operations are Amazon CloudWatch RUM and Amazon CloudWatch Evidently. In this post, we will take you through a […]

Update your Amazon CloudWatch dashboards automatically using Amazon EventBridge and AWS Lambda

Amazon CloudWatch lets customers collect monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and alarms. This allows for easy visualization and notifications regarding their workload health. Amazon CloudWatch dashboards are customizable home pages in the CloudWatch console that you can use to monitor your resources in a single view, even those resources that […]

How and when to enable session cookies with Amazon CloudWatch RUM

Amazon CloudWatch RUM is a real user monitoring service that closes the gap between the end-user experience in a web application, and the serving of that content from your AWS or on-premises environment. By measuring client-side application performance, such as page load time and JavaScript errors, you have access to new and powerful tools for […]

Create metrics and alarms for specific web pages with Amazon CloudWatch RUM

Amazon CloudWatch RUM makes it easy for AWS customers to access real-world performance metrics from web applications, thereby giving insights into the end-user experience. These user experiences are quantified into discrete metrics that you can then create alarms for. But what if you must have different load time alarms for certain pages? Or you’re testing […]

Share your Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards with anyone using AWS Single Sign-On

Amazon CloudWatch enables customers to collect monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, alarms, and events, thereby allowing easy workload visualization and notifications. Traditionally, operational health data access was only viewable for technical support staff, thereby making operational health opaque to a wider business audience. However, actionable and valuable business insights can […]

Viewing permission issues with service-linked roles

Each AWS service requires explicit access to resources, endpoints, and objects that reside in the domain of another service. This is referred to as the permission boundary. Services like AWS Config, Amazon Macie, and AWS GuardDuty require an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role that grants access to resources outside of its control. Understanding […]