Testing Professor
Testing ProfessorMulti-Cloud Guidebook · AWS
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Monitoring & Observability

Amazon CloudWatch

Metrics, logs, alarms and dashboards for AWS and your apps.

Official docs

Overview

CloudWatch collects metrics from every AWS service, ingests application/agent logs, evaluates alarms and renders dashboards. Includes Synthetics canaries and RUM.

When to use it

  • Operational monitoring of any AWS workload
  • Alerting on SLO breaches
  • Centralized application logs

Setup

  1. Most services emit metrics by default. Install CloudWatch Agent on EC2/on-prem for OS metrics & logs.
  2. Create Log Groups per app and set retention.
  3. Define alarms (Static or Anomaly Detection) → SNS topic for notifications.
  4. Build dashboards mixing metrics, logs and alarms.

How to use

Tail logs in real time
aws logs tail /aws/lambda/my-fn --follow
Logs Insights query
fields @timestamp, @message
| filter @message like /ERROR/
| sort @timestamp desc
| limit 50

QA use cases

  • Create Synthetics canaries that run Playwright-like scripts every 5 minutes against prod and alert on failure.
  • Build a 'Release Health' dashboard tracking p95 latency, 5xx rate and queue depth during QA windows.