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Observability

Understanding what your systems are doing — and why.


The Three Pillars

Logs     → what happened (events, errors, audit trail)
Metrics  → how much / how fast (numbers over time)
Traces   → where it happened across services (distributed request flow)

Observability = all three, correlated.


Notes in This Section

Note Source
APM & Monitoring Apprenticeship, Feb 2026
CloudWatch Coming

AWS Observability Stack

Purpose Service
Logs CloudWatch Logs
Metrics + Alarms CloudWatch Metrics + Alarms
Dashboards CloudWatch Dashboards
Distributed tracing AWS X-Ray
Insights from logs CloudWatch Logs Insights
Contributor analysis CloudWatch Contributor Insights
Application signals CloudWatch Application Signals