Title
AWS re:Invent 2022 - Developing an Observability Strategy (COP302)
Summary
- The session was presented by Alex, Anja De Velta, and Igor Sedokin, all of whom are specialists in observability at AWS.
- Observability is crucial for any business to perform to expectations and must scale with business needs.
- The session covered the importance of designing an observability strategy that focuses on customer experience rather than just technical metrics like CPU, RAM, and disk usage.
- The speakers emphasized working backwards from customer needs to determine Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and metrics that truly reflect customer experience.
- They demonstrated the use of AWS tools such as CloudWatch, real user monitoring, and Service Lens to observe and troubleshoot applications.
- The session included a practical demonstration of how to use AWS services to identify and resolve issues like slow page loads and DynamoDB throttling.
- The speakers highlighted the importance of creating meaningful alerts, designing dashboards for stakeholders, and using logs and traces to get to the root cause of issues quickly.
- They concluded by encouraging attendees to take a new observability training course and to visit the observability stand at the expo.
Insights
- Observability strategies should be customer-centric, focusing on metrics that directly impact the customer experience rather than just system health.
- Stakeholder engagement is critical in defining observability KPIs, as they understand customer requirements and business impact.
- Percentiles are more informative than averages when monitoring performance metrics, as they can reveal issues that averages might hide.
- Real user monitoring and Service Lens are powerful tools for gaining insights into actual user experiences and troubleshooting issues in real-time.
- Composite alarms and anomaly detection in CloudWatch can help reduce alarm noise and ensure alerts are actionable and meaningful.
- The use of structured logs and traces with annotations can significantly improve the efficiency of troubleshooting and root cause analysis.
- AWS provides a range of tools and services that can be leveraged to create a comprehensive observability strategy, and continuous education through courses can enhance the ability to effectively use these tools.