Book Image

AWS Observability Handbook

By : Phani Kumar Lingamallu, Fabio Braga de Oliveira
Book Image

AWS Observability Handbook

By: Phani Kumar Lingamallu, Fabio Braga de Oliveira

Overview of this book

As modern application architecture grows increasingly complex, identifying potential points of failure and measuring end user satisfaction, in addition to monitoring application availability, is key. This book helps you explore AWS observability tools that provide end-to-end visibility, enabling quick identification of performance bottlenecks in distributed applications. You’ll gain a holistic view of monitoring and observability on AWS, starting from observability basics using Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray to advanced ML-powered tools such as AWS DevOps Guru. As you progress, you'll learn about AWS-managed open source services such as AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) and AWS managed Prometheus, Grafana, and the ELK Stack. You’ll implement observability in EC2 instances, containers, Kubernetes, and serverless apps and grasp UX monitoring. With a fair mix of concepts and examples, this book helps you gain hands-on experience in implementing end-to-end AWS observability in your applications and navigating and troubleshooting performance issues with the help of use cases. You'll also learn best practices and guidelines, such as how observability relates to the Well-Architected Framework. By the end of this AWS book, you’ll be able to implement observability and monitoring in your apps using AWS’ native and managed open source tools in real-world scenarios.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started with Observability on AWS
6
Part 2: Automated and Machine Learning-Powered Observability on AWS
11
Part 3: Open Source Managed Services on AWS
15
Part 4: Scaled Observability and Beyond

Overview of AWS X-Ray

X-Ray is a powerful service and very easy to use, but to understand it better, we can’t escape learning its vocabulary. You can find a collection of the main concepts and building blocks, which are well explained, in the AWS documentation (see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/xray/latest/devguide/xray-concepts.html). We will provide the same list here for completeness.

X-Ray concepts

Here is a list defining the main concepts related to X-Ray:

  • Segments: Each application sends information about its unit of work as segments. This segment contains information about the host, the request, the response, start and end times, and any errors or exceptions that happened between the start/end.
  • Subsegments: Subsegments further break down the work recorded by segments. Subsegments register more granular details about your application code or downstream calls.
  • Service graph: With segments and subsegments, X-Ray builds a service graph, where each resource...