Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - How to monitor applications across multiple accounts (COP316)

Summary

• Amazon CloudWatch Cross-Account Observability was launched, receiving positive feedback.
• Omur Krikci, Senior Product Manager at CloudWatch, hosted the session.
• The session covered challenges in centralized monitoring and the benefits of the new feature.
• Anthony Giles from JPMorgan Chase shared their use case of the feature.
• Bobby Hallan, Senior Specialist Solution Architect, provided a live demo of the feature.
• The feature addresses the issue of monitoring applications across multiple AWS accounts, which is a common best practice for security and billing but creates monitoring challenges.
• CloudWatch Cross-Account Observability allows seamless search, analysis, and visualization of telemetry data (logs, metrics, traces) across accounts as if operating in a single account.
• It provides a centralized view without extra cost or data duplication, using a monitoring account that has read-only access to telemetry data in source accounts.
• The setup is straightforward, involving defining monitoring and source accounts and linking them.
• The feature integrates with AWS Organizations for automatic addition of new accounts to the monitoring setup.
• It is available through programmatic access (CloudFormation, AWS SDK, CLI).
• ServiceLens and X-Ray are now cross-account, enabling centralized application monitoring and reducing operational event impact.
• The feature aims to reduce mean time to resolution, improve operator satisfaction, and come at no extra cost.

Insights

• The launch of CloudWatch Cross-Account Observability is a response to one of the top customer requests, indicating AWS's commitment to customer-driven innovation.
• The feature's integration with AWS Organizations suggests a focus on scalability and ease of management for large enterprises with complex organizational structures.
• The emphasis on no extra cost and ease of setup indicates AWS's strategy to encourage adoption by reducing barriers to entry.
• The use case presented by JPMorgan Chase demonstrates the feature's real-world applicability and potential impact on large financial institutions with stringent reliability and performance requirements.
• The live demo by Bobby Hallan highlighted the practicality of the feature and its ability to provide a unified view of distributed applications, which is crucial for modern microservices architectures.
• The session underscored the importance of observability in cloud-native environments and the growing need for tools that can provide comprehensive insights across multiple accounts and services.