AWS CloudWatch Synthetics adds safe canary updates and automatic retries

Today, CloudWatch Synthetics, which allows monitoring of customer workflows on websites through periodically running custom code scripts, announces two new features: canary safe updates and automatic retries for failing canaries. The former allows you to test updates for your existing canaries before applying changes and the latter enables canaries to automatically attempt additional retries when a scheduled run fails, helping to differentiate between genuine and intermittent failures.

Canary safe updates helps minimize potential monitoring disruptions caused by erroneous updates. By doing a dry run you can verify canary compatibility with newly released runtimes, or with any configuration or code changes. It minimizes potential monitoring gaps by maintaining continuous monitoring during update processes and mitigates risk to end user experience in the process of keeping canaries up-to-date. The automatic retries feature helps in reducing false alarms. When enabled, it provides more reliable monitoring results by distinguishing between persistent issues and intermittent failures preventing unnecessary disruption. Users can analyze temporary failures using the canary runs graph, which employs color-coded points to represent scheduled runs and their retries. You can start using these features by accessing CloudWatch Synthetics through the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or CloudFormation.

Dry runs for safe canary updates and automatic retries are are priced the same as regular canary runs and are available in all commercial AWS Regions.

To learn more about safe canary updates and automatic retries visit the linked Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics documentation. Or get started with Synthetics monitoring by visiting the user guide.