Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When investigating a complex system—or learning about it for the first time—you need to explore metrics, traces, logs, and other kinds of data. But as you navigate across different views of your data in dashboards, alert notifications, flame graphs, and so on, it can be hard to keep track of what you have already seen. When a potential issue comes up and time is tight, the last thing you need is to spend time remembering a crucial graph or finding the right browser tab.

For complete visibility into the performance of your applications, you need telemetry data—traces, metrics, and logs—that describes activity across your entire stack. But if you’re using multiple monitoring tools, your data can end up in silos, making it difficult to troubleshoot issues that affect your user experience.

Without unified visibility across your entire stack, it can be difficult to investigate backend dependencies when troubleshooting frontend issues, or to track the source of database failures that originate from bad browser requests. Full-stack visibility gives you the insight you need to pinpoint and resolve incidents quickly.

Whether you’re deciding on follow-up items for a postmortem, submitting a request-for-comments for review, or creating an executive report, making sense of all the available data and collaborating with others to tell a clear, data-driven story can be difficult. When there are multiple stakeholders and teams working together, it can be hard to manage the back-and-forth process of feedback and revision to ensure you have up-to-date information.

API tests are key to ensuring your applications receive and respond to requests efficiently. For example, a slow API endpoint or an unexpected timeout in processing a request can significantly affect user experience, so API tests can help you monitor the performance of your endpoints and the overall health of your applications.

Many of our customers rely on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Well-Architected Framework as a guide to build safe, secure, and performant applications in the cloud. AWS offers the Well-Architected Review (WAR) Tool as a centralized way to track and trend adherence to Well-Architected best practices. It allows users to define workloads and answer a set of questions regarding operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization.

Attackers (i.e., threat actors) often reuse techniques or resources, such as IP addresses, hashes, and domains, in multiple attempts to find and exploit vulnerabilities in your systems. Defenders can categorize this data as indicators of compromise (IOCs) and create collections of IOCs in order to look out for potential attacks. These IOC collections are known as threat intelligence.

If you’re running a mix of Windows– and Linux–based hosts in hybrid or cloud environments, network monitoring is especially important—and especially difficult. As network topologies are becoming increasingly distributed and dynamic, you need a quick way to identify connectivity issues across regions, services, and operating systems.