The 3 levels of AWS observability

AWS FOR THE REAL WORLD

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Reading time: 6 minutes

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Main Learning: You cannot skip a level of AWS observability. Structured logs come first, then the AI agent that reads them for you.

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Claude Code agent (free gist)

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Hey Reader 👋🏽

This week I'm bringing back one of our most-read posts: the 3 levels of AWS observability. A lot of you joined after it went out in May, and the topic fits this week perfectly.

Because the real question isn't "do I have logs?" anymore. It's "who actually knows what they mean?" 👇🏽

What if the junior on call knew what your senior knows?

In most teams, one senior engineer knows which alert matters. "Ignore that one, it fires every Tuesday." "That's the DB again." When that person is on vacation, everybody else sorts by severity and hopes for the best.

Dynatrace built an open-source app for Kiro Crew, AWS's always-on agent workspace. It puts your production problems on a board, and an agent ranks them by recurrence, root cause and blast radius, with one line on why. "Investigate" opens a chat with the evidence already loaded, and the whole thing is read-only.

You can run it locally on demo data, no account needed.

Read how they built it →

Sponsored by Dynatrace. These are my own words.

📚 From the Archive

In 2022 I joined a startup with 100 million API requests a month. All on AWS, all logs in CloudWatch. I loved it.

Then the first incident hit. My boss was looking over my shoulder, and I didn't even know which log stream to open. As a self-claimed AWS expert.

Level 1: Log Hell

We had logs, metrics and some traces. All unstructured plain text, spread over different log streams. When a customer reported a missing order, we searched strings and compared timestamps by hand.

You cannot skip a level

Over the years I went through three levels of AWS observability. Each one builds on the one before. Most teams stop at Level 2, and that is the level that makes everything after it possible.

Level 3 is where I stopped opening the console. What does it take to get there, and why does it fail without Level 2?

📖 Read the 3 Levels →

📰 This Week in AWS

🌐AWS Lambda Web Functions

Run Express or Hono directly on Lambda, no adapter. You pay for active CPU time, not for waiting.

🔀CloudWatch log routing and chained parsers

Pipelines can now send each log event to its own log group by severity or source.

🔁Lambda loop detection for EventBridge custom buses

Lambda now stops runaway Lambda/EventBridge loops before they run up your bill.

That's it for this week.

Where is your team right now: Level 1, 2 or 3? Hit reply and tell me, I read every answer.

See you next week,
Sandro & Tobi

Sandro Volpicella & Tobias Schmidt from AWS Fundamentals
Cloud Engineers • Fullstack Developers • Educators

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AWS for the Real World