Know Before You Go – AWS re:Invent 2023 Monitoring and Observability, and Centralized Operations Management

We are so excited to see you at our annual cloud computing conference, AWS re:Invent 2023 in Las Vegas from Nov 27 to Dec 1. Whether you’re a seasoned re:Invent veteran or a first-timer, the excitement and opportunities of AWS re:Invent never cease to amaze.

With a total of 96 sessions covering the solution areas that make up AWS Cloud Operations—Monitoring and Observability, Centralized Operations Management, Compliance and Auditing, and Cloud Governance—the AWS Cloud Operations track promises a wealth of insights, best practices, and fun kiosk activities to elevate your cloud management skills to new heights.

This blog will focus on Monitoring and Observability and Centralized Operations Management, two solution areas within Cloud Operations that help organizations minimize downtime, maintain reliable operations, and reduce costs. Monitoring and Observability on AWS offers an end-to-end solution that ingests, contextualizes, visualizes, and analyzes logs, metrics, and traces for insights from modern applications, workloads, and infrastructures whether they are on-premises, hybrid, containerized, multicloud, or open source. Centralized Operations Management on AWS provides a rich set of tools for day-to-day operations across multicloud, hybrid, or on-premises environments. From patch management to incident management, Ops Management helps customers operate their applications at scale from a centralized hub while improving application availability with AIOps and other features.

Cloud Ops Kiosk at the AWS Village:

In addition to attending sessions, come visit our Cloud Operations and Observability kiosks in the AWS Village at the Expo in the Venetian (campus map). Come spin the prize wheel to win swag, meet our experts, do a fun VR experience, and come learn about the future of Cloud Operations.

To learn more about observability and ops management, learn about our kiosks and sessions below, and make sure to favorite the following sessions in the session catalogue.

Sessions to Attend:

There are also many other sessions to choose from depending on your business needs and interests. Here’s a snapshot of sessions to look forward to:

Monitoring and Observability:

COP339 | What’s new with AWS observability and operations – Breakout Session

Whether you are operating in the cloud or migrating your operations, AWS can help you manage and provide insights into your applications and infrastructure across multiple environments. Attend this session to learn about the most recent innovations that you can use to elevate and optimize your cloud operations. Dive into the latest launches with demos of AWS IT management tools and observability solutions

COP343 | Building observability to increase resiliency – Breakout Session

Using observability effectively is essential for proving your resilient system operates the way you planned. Well-applied observability helps you find early signs of problems, before they impact customers, and react quickly to mitigate impact. In this session, learn how you can use observability best practices to improve your resilience posture in AWS. Dive deep into real-world failure modes, and see how you can use the right combination of instrumentation and observability tools to solve them quickly. This session includes a demo of these techniques and practices using AWS services like Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray.

COP319 | Best practices for container observability – Breakout Session

In the fast-paced world of containerized applications and environments, achieving comprehensive observability is crucial for ensuring optimal performance, reliability, and user experience. Join this session to delve into the best practices for container observability. Discover how to effectively monitor, analyze, and troubleshoot your Amazon EKS and Amazon ECS environments with AWS observability. Learn about best practices that can help you eliminate manual management of agents and optimize resource allocation while giving you insights into your containerized workloads.

COP322 | Implementing application observability – Breakout Session

Observability helps you diagnose issues quickly and make things right sooner. In this session, learn how to implement observability into all the layers of your applications with Amazon CloudWatch, so you can understand how your application is performing, from your users to your backend systems.

COP325 | Building an effective observability strategy – Breakout Session

Building a strategy is key to improving your observability maturity to ensure that you delight your customers. In this session, explore why observability is important, what and how you should observe, and which observability metrics can best support your business outcomes. Dive deep into different techniques and practices using services like Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray.

COP326 | Get actionable insights from Amazon CloudWatch Logs – Breakout Session

Are you maximizing the value from your Amazon CloudWatch Logs? Join this session to get more out of your CloudWatch Logs when you optimize for the right insights. Learn how you can use the latest capabilities in CloudWatch Logs to improve your observability posture. Learn how to use the logs you already ingest by adding context to your data. From pattern detection with machine learning to high-res capabilities in EMF to real-time interactive analysis, see how you can get actionable insights from your logs.

COP306 | Hands-on experience with Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray – Workshop

Your enterprise’s agility, customer satisfaction, and business growth depends on setting up great observability. In order to build high-performing and reliable applications, AWS provides a variety of turnkey AWS observability services and solutions. In this workshop, learn how to monitor AWS services with Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray, get hands-on experience with the most common use cases, and learn about and implement the newest features available. You must bring your laptop to participate.

COP309 | Monitor end user experience with Amazon CloudWatch – Builders’ Session

By extending application performance monitoring to end users and frontend experiences, AWS digital experience monitoring enhances customer experiences with an outside-in perspective of application performance across all user touchpoints. Such user experience data completes the picture and helps organizations turn frontend performance, user behavior, and APIs into actionable KPIs such as release velocity, adoption rate, and conversions. In this builders’ session, learn how applications behave by monitoring both real and synthetic user activity and behavior, using data from ISPs and AWS and capturing insights from backend infrastructure and devices and digital user metrics. You must bring your laptop to participate.

COP401 | Coding for container observability – Code Talk

Join this session to learn about and see examples of using the OpenTelemetry SDK and the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) Collector to collect signals from a variety of environments. Also see how you can design a robust and highly available ADOT pipeline in a busy container environment to support operations at massive scale.

Centralized Operations Management

COP320 | Centralize your operations – Breakout Session

Whatever stage you are at in your process of moving to or operating in the cloud, AWS offers a centralized operations management solution that you can use to manage and operate your applications on AWS, on-premises, in hybrid environments, and at the edge. In this session, learn how you can use AWS Systems Manager to automate proactive processes, such as patching and resource changes, and remediate issues with hundreds of runbooks. Using automation, you can make it easier to minimize service disruptions, simplify time-consuming processes, and avoid repetitive tasks to reach operational efficiency.

COP325 | Building an effective observability strategy – Breakout Session

COP314 | All things patch: Manage patching on AWS, on premises and on other clouds – Chalk Talk

In this chalk talk, discover how you can quickly activate patching operations at scale across your AWS accounts and AWS Regions within your AWS Organization using AWS Systems Manager. Learn how to manage patching operations for Amazon EC2 instances, edge devices, on-premises servers, and virtual machines (VMs) in other cloud environments. Finally, explore how Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight can be used to set up patch compliance reporting and to create patch compliance.

COP316 | Automating incident response with Incident Manager – Chalk Talk

In this chalk talk, learn how to prepare for incidents and how to automatically take action when a critical issue is detected by an Amazon CloudWatch alarm or Amazon EventBridge event. Also, explore how to perform a post-incident analysis, based on decades of experience in incident response and analysis at AWS.

COP330 | Accelerate your operations with AIOps – Chalk Talk

Would you like to spend more time innovating and less time operating your applications? In this chalk talk, learn how AIOps (artificial intelligence for IT operations) can simplify and automate your operational workflows and help make sense of the chaos when it matters most. Also learn about AIOps best practices on AWS with Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon DevOps Guru, and discover how you can use them to save time.

COP403 | Efficiency unleashed: Automating incident remediation – Code Talk

Performing operations as code, a design principle recommended by the AWS Well-Architected Framework, can help organizations perform operations more efficiently, limit human error, and achieve predictable results. In this code talk, learn how to implement operations as code. Also, find out how to automate remediations for non-compliant resources in AWS Config and Amazon CloudWatch alarms and incidents using Automation, a capability of AWS Systems Manager.

Types of Cloud Ops Sessions:

At re:Invent, you can learn more about AWS Cloud Operations and interact with subject matter experts (SMEs) through various sessions such as the Innovation Talk and our kiosks at the Expo.

Breakout sessions consist of one or more speakers presenting content to a large audience. Workshops are interactive sessions where attendees work in small groups to build a solution to a problem using AWS. Chalk talks are highly interactive and begin with a short lecture delivered by an AWS expert, followed by a 45–50-minute whiteboarding and Q&A session. Builders’ sessions are small-group sessions led by one AWS expert that start with a short demonstration followed up attendees experimenting and building with the AWS expert. Be sure to take advantage of all of the learning opportunities this year with AWS Cloud Operations at re:Invent 2023.

About the authors:

AWS Cloud Operations Blog