AWS Cloud Operations Blog

Category: Management Tools

Announcing AWS CloudTrail Lake Dashboards – Visualize and Analyze CloudTrail data

In January 2022, AWS announced general availability of AWS CloudTrail Lake, a managed audit and security lake that allows you to aggregate, immutably store and query activity logs for auditing, security investigation and operational troubleshooting. Since launch, thousands of customers have adopted this feature. We are excited to announce that CloudTrail Lake dashboards are now […]

Prioritize business-critical needs with the Profiles feature in the AWS Well-Architected Tool

The AWS Well-Architected Framework is a collection of design principles, concepts, and best practices that helps cloud architects build and operate secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for a variety of applications and workloads. Using the Well-Architected Framework Review (WAFR), organizations can measure their cloud workloads against the AWS Well-Architected Framework best practices to help […]

Announcing AWS Config now supports recording exclusions by resource type

AWS Config is a service that tracks configuration changes of AWS resources in your AWS account. AWS Config uses the configuration recorder to detect these changes and then captures them as configuration items. The configuration recorder is created and started in each Region where you set up AWS Config. By default, the configuration recorder records […]

How to test your AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery implementation

Maintaining application and data resilience in the face of an ever-evolving risk landscape is a challenge for applications with legacy architectures. These risks can include ransomware attacks, natural disasters, user error, hardware faults, and many others. Organizations want to recover workloads within appropriate timescales with minimal loss of data from an unforeseen event. Organizations seek […]

Use Amazon CloudWatch Contributor Insights for general analysis of NGINX logs

Customers build, deploy, and maintain millions of web applications on AWS and many customers deploy these applications using NGINX. The NGINX application server offers configurability, scalability, and the ability to handle millions of concurrent requests. Web application performance is key in modern enterprise infrastructure and applications. Customers leverage CloudWatch to monitor response times, uptime, and […]

Managing CloudWatch Synthetics canaries at scale

Managing CloudWatch Synthetics canaries at scale

Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics offers an automated approach to monitoring the performance and availability of your application endpoints, REST APIs, and website content, allowing you to discover issues before your customers do. As your applications and suite of accompanying canaries grows over time, it becomes more challenging and time consuming to manage them at scale. This […]

Perform A/B testing and dark launches of your IoT applications using AWS IoT Core and Amazon CloudWatch Evidently

Perform A/B testing and dark launches of your IoT applications using AWS IoT Core and Amazon CloudWatch Evidently

Update (October 2025) – After careful consideration, we have made the decision to discontinue CloudWatch Evidently, effective 10/17/2025. For full details, see the official deprecation notice. The development of Internet of Things (IoT) applications is accelerating as companies build and maintain these applications at a faster pace to meet the needs of their customers and […]

How to grant least privilege access to third-parties on your private EC2 instances with AWS Systems Manager

AWS Systems Manager Session Manager provides a more secure way to manage your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances without the need to open inbound ports, maintain bastion hosts, or manage SSH keys. Furthermore, you can use it with a combination of AWS services to give access to external third-parties. Due to business requirements, you […]

Managing Technical Diversity and Migration Capability in Mergers and Acquisitions

In Mergers and Acquisitions, the need to understand and manage technical diversity and migration readiness is paramount to ensure cohesion and continued success for the combined organization. This blog post discusses some of the considerations in this space and highlights existing AWS Mechanisms that can help organizations through this process across three phases: Assess, Mobilize, […]

Automate creation of Amazon CloudWatch alarms and dashboards with AWS Systems Manager and Ansible

Automate creation of Amazon CloudWatch alarms and dashboards with AWS Systems Manager and Ansible

Monitoring Amazon EC2 instances is critical to proactively identify any underlying issues or to troubleshoot the performance of the instances. Amazon CloudWatch provides a reliable, scalable, and flexible monitoring solution. Customers running EC2 instances in a self-managed environment typically use Amazon CloudWatch metrics to monitor the performance of their instances and set up alarms for […]