Use CloudWatch Application Signals to automatically instrument your applications on AWS so that you can monitor current application health and track long-term application performance against your business objectives. Application Signals provides you with a unified, application-centric view of your applications, services, and dependencies, and helps you monitor and triage application health.
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Enable Application Signals to automatically collect metrics and traces from your applications, and display key metrics such as call volume, availability, latency, faults, and errors. Quickly see and triage current operational health, and whether your applications are meeting their longer-term performance goals, without writing custom code or creating dashboards.
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Create and monitor service-level objectives (SLOs) with Application Signals. Easily create and track status of SLOs related to CloudWatch metrics, including the new standard application metrics that Application Signals collects. See and track the service level indicator (SLI) status of your application services within a services list and topology map. Create alarms to track your SLOs, and track the new standard application metrics that Application Signals collects.
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See a map of your application topology that Application Signals automatically discovers, that gives you a visual representation of your applications, dependencies, and their connectivity.
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Application Signals works with CloudWatch RUM, CloudWatch Synthetics canaries, AWS Service Catalog AppRegistry, and Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling to display your client pages, Synthetics canaries, and application names within dashboards and maps.
Use Application Signals for daily application monitoring
Use Application Signals within the CloudWatch console, as part of daily application monitoring:
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If you have created service level objectives (SLOs) for your services, start with the Service Level Objectives (SLO) page. This gives you an immediate view of the health of your most critical services and operations. Choose the service or operation name for an SLO to open the Service detail page and see detailed service information as you troubleshoot issues.
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Open the Services page to see a summary of all your services, and quickly see services with the highest fault rate or latency. If you have created SLOs, look at the Services table to see which services have unhealthy service level indicators (SLIs). If a particular service is in an unhealthy state, select the service to open the Service detail page and see service operations, dependencies, Synthetics canaries, and client requests. Select a point in a graph to see correlated traces so that you can troubleshoot and identify the root cause of operational issues.
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If new services have been deployed or dependencies have changed, open the Service Map to inspect your application topology. See a map of your applications that shows the relationship between clients, Synthetics canaries, services, and dependencies. Quickly see SLI health, view key metrics such as call volume, fault rate, and latency, and drill down to see more detailed information in the Service detail page.
Using Application Signals incurs charges. For information about CloudWatch pricing, see Amazon CloudWatch Pricing
Note
It is not necessary to enable Application Signals to use CloudWatch Synthetics, CloudWatch RUM, or CloudWatch Evidently. However, Synthetics and CloudWatch RUM work with Application Signals to provide benefits when you use these features together.
Application Signals cross-account
With Application Signals cross-account observability, you can monitor and troubleshoot your applications that span multiple AWS accounts within a single Region.
You can use Amazon CloudWatch Observability Access Manager to set up one or more of your AWS accounts as a monitoring account. You’ll provide the monitoring account with the ability to view data in your source account by creating a sink in your monitoring account. You use the sink to create a link from your source account to your monitoring account. For more information, see CloudWatch cross-account observability.
Required resources
For proper functionality of Application Signals cross-account observability, ensure that the following telemetry types are shared through the CloudWatch Observability Access Manager.
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Application Signals services and service level objectives (SLOs)
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Metrics in Amazon CloudWatch
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Log groups in Amazon CloudWatch Logs
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Traces in AWS X-Ray
Supported languages and architectures
Application Signals supports Java, Python, Node.js, and .NET applications.
Application Signals is supported and tested on Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS, and Amazon EC2. On Amazon EKS clusters, it automatically discovers the names of your services and clusters. On other architectures, you must supply the names of services and environments when you enable those services for Application Signals.
The instructions for enabling Application Signals on Amazon EC2 should work on any architecture that supports the CloudWatch agent and AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry. However, the instructions have not been tested on architectures other than Amazon ECS and Amazon EC2.
Supported Regions
Application Signals is supported in every commercial Region except for Canada West (Calgary).
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