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

End-to-end tracing of the Node.js application

In the last section, we saw how to enable enhanced metrics for gathering additional metrics for Lambda functions. Let’s enable X-Ray active tracing. Active tracing is a feature of AWS X-Ray that provides visibility into the performance of your serverless applications. When enabled, active tracing captures detailed information about the flow of a request as it travels through the different components of your application, such as AWS Lambda functions, API Gateway, and DynamoDB. To gain a deeper understanding of AWS X-Ray and explore the various console-level options available in CloudWatch X-Ray, please refer to Chapter 4, Implementing Distributed Tracing Using AWS X-Ray.

Let’s enable active tracing for both the API Gateway and the Lambda function using the CloudFormation template in step 3. I describe changes made in the CloudFormation template in steps 1 and 2 as follows:

  1. To enable active tracing for the Lambda...