Know Before You Go – AWS re:Invent 2022 Monitoring & Observability

Whether you are building out applications in the cloud, modernizing your environment, or migrating workloads, observability is vital to your success. Monitoring and observability provide operational visibility and insight into your workloads and are crucial to operational excellence. AWS Observability will be at re:Invent 2022 to share how you can leverage observability for your organization.

Observability helps you gain insights by looking at your system through metrics, logs, and traces. With observability, you’re able to see a holistic view of your workload and understand why and how your system is meeting your Service Level Objectives (SLO) with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Monitoring enables an observable system, providing insights into its observable properties such as reliability, availability, and performance in order to measure a system’s state via KPIs.

This re:Invent, the AWS Observability team will be presenting new capabilities, best practices, tips on setting up your observability strategy, and a host of demos to show you how you can do everything from setting up custom widgets in your Amazon CloudWatch dashboards to using the new Amazon EKS Observability Accelerator to collect telemetry from your container applications. Come by the AWS Observability kiosk in the Expo Hall to meet Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) from these sessions and grab some swag!

re:Invent will be held in Las Vegas, Nevada, from November 28 to December 2. If you missed us at re:Invent, you can watch the breakout sessions on YouTube.

Sessions to Attend

COP301 | Observability the open-source way – Breakout session
Nov 28, 10:00 am, Caesars Forum (CSR) 121
Instrumenting applications to collect monitoring signals such as metrics, traces, and logs can be challenging when using vendor-specific SDKs and collectors. OpenTelemetry provides a flexible, single SDK based on open-source specifications that you can use to instrument and collect signals from applications and infrastructure. Using the OpenTelemetry collector, you can collect these signals and send them to your destination of choice. This session dives deep into how to instrument microservice-based applications with the OpenTelemetry SDK. Learn how to configure the collector pipeline to send monitoring signals to destinations such as Prometheus, Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS X-Ray. Watch this session on YouTube.

COP223 | Data-driven application performance monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch – Chalk talk
Nov 28, 10:45 am, MGM Grand 104
Customers demand high-quality user experiences when interacting with your applications or public websites. Good customer experience increases customer satisfaction and drives revenue and market share. Application performance monitoring (APM) is key to understanding how your customers are using your applications and where they encounter pain points. It helps you be intentional about designing applications, building new features, and testing and rolling out new features with minimal or no end user impact. Join this talk to learn how you can use Amazon CloudWatch to set up APM using Amazon CloudWatch RUM, CloudWatch Evidently, AWS X-Ray, and CloudWatch Synthetics.

COP201 | How Discovery increased operational efficiency with AWS observability – Breakout session
Nov 28, 11:30 am, Mandalay Bay (MND) Lagoon L
In this session, hear how Discovery has modernized their observability platform by building a cohesive centralized platform on AWS to manage the ingestion, processing, retention, metering, analysis, visualization, and governance of operational data such as logs, metrics, traces, and tags. Additionally, learn how to build a large-scale observability platform on AWS that improves developer experience, increases flexibility, and helps improve organizational fiscal responsibility. Watch it on YouTube.

COP341 | Get to know your application with OpenTelemetry and AWS X-Ray – Builders’ session
Nov 28, 12:15 pm, Wynn (WYN) Latour 7
Observability is often described in terms of 3 pillars: traces, metrics, and logs. However, the industry doesn’t have a standard definition or implementation for these components. This builders’ session focuses on traces. Learn how to deploy an Amazon EKS web-service application and set up targets to capture traces and then send them to the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry Collector, which publishes trace data to AWS X-Ray. Work with AWS experts to experiment with the OpenTelemetry project and learn how you can integrate with AWS observability tools and use it in your business. You must bring your laptop to participate.

COP330 | Scale with managed open-source observability – Chalk talk
Nov 28, 2:30 pm, Caesars Forum (CSR) 110
As enterprises scale, they require application reliability and availability to keep up with their growth, especially to monitor the increasing millions of pieces of operational data generated. Join this chalk talk to hear about what’s new in our AWS managed open-source services that can help you to securely set up a single pane of glass across alerts and observability telemetry with Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, Amazon Managed Grafana, and AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry. Learn about best practices and discuss how to use newly launched features to build out a scalable, highly available open-source observability solution with unified alert management.

COP340 | Monitor end user experience with Amazon CloudWatch – Builders’ session
Nov 29, 1:15 pm, Wynn (WYN) Latour 7
You’re great at watching your application from the server side, but what about your users? How do you know when they are having a bad experience? In this builders’ session, walk through measuring end user experiences from the application and network perspective, and learn how to take automated action to remediate issues. You must bring your laptop to participate.

COP309 | Accelerate AWS observability for your containers – Workshop
Nov 29, 2:00 pm, MGM Grand 117
Collecting observability signals, such as metrics, logs, and traces, from container environments can be a challenging task. In this workshop, get hands-on experience with AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry using opinionated solutions such as Amazon EKS observability accelerator and the new Amazon ECS console experience to collect metrics and traces from your container applications and send them to AWS observability services such as Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, and AWS X-Ray. Also, learn to query, correlate, and visualize signals from these data sources along with advanced configurations such as Grafana teams and SAML integration with third-party authentication providers using Amazon Managed Grafana. You must bring your laptop to participate.

COP212 | Leadership panel discussion: Monitoring and observability on AWS – Breakout session
Nov 29, 5:00 pm, The Venetian (VEN) Theatre
In this session, Nandini Ramani, VP of AWS Monitoring & Observability, sits down with three dynamic AWS customers to discuss their paths to success with AWS observability solutions. Join Fidelity Investments, United Airlines, and Federated Wireless for an engaging discussion about how their teams spearhead the observability culture in their organizations and their distinct industries. These organizations share how they leveraged observability to solve challenges their teams faced, improved application performance, optimized DevOps team performance, and elevated their customer experience. Learn what these AWS customers think is the future of observability for their companies and industries. Watch the panel discussion on YouTube.

COP328 | Using Amazon EKS Observability Accelerator to collect signals on Amazon EKS – Chalk talk
Nov 29, 5:30 pm, Caesars Forum (CSR) Alliance 311
Most organizations are adopting infrastructure as code to run their business. Being able to consistently repeat deployments and create new environments allows a rapid pace of innovation. Observability also contributes to this acceleration. With the Amazon EKS Observability Accelerator, organizations can focus on their applications and instrumentations. In this chalk talk, learn how you can use the Observability Accelerator to turn an application into a fully deployed service with observability enabled.

COP222 | Visualize everything: Grafana dashboards on AWS – Chalk talk
Nov 29, 4:15 pm, Caesars Forum (CSR) Academy 412
As you build a multi-account environment for your applications, how do you visualize everything from a single place? Are you using multiple tools to visualize logs and metrics? Do you set up alerts in each account? In this chalk talk, learn how you can use Amazon Managed Grafana in an organization, leverage SSO authentication and unified alerting for beautiful dashboards that aggregate data from multiple accounts, and gain a single source of truth for application management.

COP327 | Cut through the chaos: Monitoring for business outcomes – Chalk talk
Nov 29, 3:30 pm, Caesars Forum (CSR) 110
As your services become more distributed, you may be presented with thousands or even millions of metrics that indicate the health of your application. In this chalk talk, learn which metrics are critical for determining the health of your applications, and find out how this relates to your service-level objectives and indicators (SLOs and SLIs). This talk encourages you to think differently about what’s important and how you measure it.

COP316 | How to monitor applications across multiple accounts – Breakout session
Nov 30, 9:15am, Caesars Forum (CSR) Summit 201
Increasingly, companies are employing multi-account architectures to reduce the impact of operational events. In this session, learn how to use AWS observability services in a multi-account architecture to monitor your entire application from a centralized view. Learn how to use Amazon CloudWatch as the single pane of glass monitoring for your multi-account organizations and hear from AWS customers how they use CloudWatch to easily search, visualize, and analyze cross-account metrics, logs, and traces when monitoring applications. Watch the session on YouTube.

COP329 | Observability patterns for highly available applications – Chalk talk
Nov 30, 10:00 am, MGM Grand Boulevard 167
Designing highly available applications can be a long journey with a great deal of trial and error. Being able to ask questions about your system’s health in unpredictable ways and capture small signals of performance degradation and poor end user experience can help you succeed on this path. AWS services and features allow deep visibility into your systems and applications. In this chalk talk, walk through patterns, lessons learned, and AWS solutions that can help you set up a rock-solid observability platform for your organization.

COP342 | Become a dashboard expert – Builders’ session
Nov 30, 11:30 am, Caesars Forum (CSR) Alliance 312
Need to see your worst-performing servers? You got it! Share your dashboards with the C-suite? Done! Create custom widgets that enable automation? Not a problem! In this builders’ session, learn best practices and tricks of the trade for visualizing your applications, environment, and workloads using Amazon CloudWatch dashboards, and then share these with anyone. Even change your application’s functionality in real time with CloudWatch Evidently integration. You must bring your laptop to participate.

COP343 | Observability Best Practices at Amazon – Breakout session
Nov 30, 11:30 am, Caesars Forum (CSR) Summit 214
In this session, learn about Amazon’s never-ending journey for the perfect granularity of observability. This session covers the full range of monitoring at Amazon—from how teams assess system health at a high level to how they zoom in to understand the details of a single request. Learn best practices for metrics, logs, and tracing and how to use these signals to achieve operational excellence. Watch this session on YouTube.

COP339 | AWS open-source observability for monitoring Amazon ECS – Builders’ session
Nov 30, 1:00 pm, Mandalay Bay (MND) South Pacific D
Do you know how to instrument your microservices running on Amazon ECS to collect and visualize metrics and logs? This hands-on builders’ session focuses on metrics and logs. You will take a sample microservice application running on AWS Fargate and send metrics using AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry to Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus. Learn how to configure the container to collect and send logs to Amazon CloudWatch using FireLens. Build a dashboard with Amazon Managed Grafana using metrics data from Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus and logs from CloudWatch Logs as data sources. You must bring your laptop to participate.

COP210 – FINRA: Democratize data and solve issues faster with Grafana – Breakout session
Nov 30, 2:30 pm, MGM Grand Chairmans 355
When operational incidents happen, engineers need access to data as soon as possible so they can quickly diagnose and fix issues. FINRA was able to solve this problem by creating an enhanced operational reporting and visualization platform built on Amazon Managed Grafana. Their solution reduced time to resolution, improved their customer experience, and improved the overall operational posture of the organization. Join this session to learn how you can make data accessible, in a secure way, throughout your organization so your teams can operate more effectively and efficiently. Watch it on YouTube.

COP308 | Hands-on experience with AWS observability services – Workshop
Nov 30, 2:30 pm, Caesars Forum (CSR) Academy 409
Setting up great observability is key for successful IT operations, improved customer satisfaction, business growth, and agility in your enterprise. AWS offers a variety of turnkey observability services and solutions that you can deploy to build a reliable and scalable IT infrastructure in your environment. In this workshop, gain hands-on experience with how services such as Amazon CloudWatch, AWS X-Ray, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, Amazon Managed Grafana, and AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry can be used to set up monitoring on a variety of services, including Amazon EC2, Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS, AWS Lambda, and many others. You must bring your laptop to participate.

COP302 | Developing an observability strategy – Breakout session
Nov 30, 4:00 pm, Mandalay Bay (MND) Oceanside D
Do you have a plan for your observability? Do you understand what the stakeholders for your applications want to observe? As you move to the cloud or mature your operations within the cloud, it’s important to optimize your observability to help your stakeholders understand how your applications are operating. Join this session to learn how to define your observability strategy for the future in order to serve the requirements of all of your stakeholders and to help ensure that you can deliver successful business outcomes. Watch this session on YouTube.

COP344 | Observability: Best practices for modern applications – Breakout session
Dec 1, 4:15 pm, MGM Grand 115
When you are faced with an application disruption or operational incident, it is critical to resolve the issue as quickly as possible before it impacts your customers. For modern containerized or serverless applications this challenge is magnified due to their distributed nature. In this session, learn observability best practices for your modern application architectures. We will show you how to use AWS observability services to rapidly identify, diagnose, and remediate application issues. Watch it on YouTube.

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