Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics Adds Java Runtime for Lightweight API Monitoring

Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics now supports the Java programming language for authoring canaries, enabling developers to write monitoring scripts using the Java 21 runtime environment. This new runtime, syn-java-1.0, allows customers to leverage existing Java expertise to continuously monitor the availability and performance of their services and applications using CloudWatch Synthetics.

With Java support, customers can now bring their existing Java-based tests—often used in integration pipelines—into production environments as part of their synthetic monitoring strategy. These canaries support modular step execution with built-in metric generation, queryable logs using the canaryRunId, and optional X-Ray tracing to visualize request paths across services. The Java runtime is designed for non-browser use cases, making canaries lightweight and faster and letting customers bring their own libraries and frameworks suited to their differentiated monitoring needs. Customers can use Java build tools like Maven or Gradle to package their monitoring code—along with a synthetics.json configuration file—into a deployable ZIP artifact, which can then be used with the Synthetics APIs, SDKs, or infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform and CloudFormation for deploying canaries.

The Java runtime is now available in all commercial AWS Regions where CloudWatch Synthetics is supported. Visit this page to learn more about the features and support policy for the Java runtime, or visit CloudWatch Synthetics user guide to create your first canary today.