Amazon CloudWatch launches full visibility into application transactions
AWS announces the general availability of an enhanced search and analytics experience in CloudWatch Application Signals. This feature empowers developers and on-call engineers with complete visibility into application transaction spans, which are the building blocks of distributed traces that capture detailed interactions between users and various application components.
This feature offers 3 core benefits. First, developers can answer any questions related to application performance or end-user impact through an interactive visual editor and enhancements to Logs Insights queries. They can correlate spans with end-user issues using attributes like customer name or order number. With the new JSON parse and unnest functions in Logs Insights, they can link transactions to business events such as failed payments and troubleshoot. Second, developers can diagnose rarely occurring issues, such as p99 latency spikes in APIs, with the enhanced troubleshooting capabilities in Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals that correlates application metrics with comprehensive transaction spans. Finally, CloudWatch Logs offers advanced features for transaction spans, including data masking, forwarding via subscription filters, and metric extraction. You can enable these capabilities for existing spans sent to X-Ray or by sending spans to a new OTLP (OpenTelemetry Protocol) endpoint for traces. This allows you to enhance your observability while maintaining flexibility in your setup.
You can search and analyze spans in all regions where Application Signals is available. A new pricing option is also available , encompassing Application Signals, X-Ray traces, and complete visibility into transaction spans - see Amazon CloudWatch pricing. Refer to documentation for more details.