Monitoring and DevOps Best Practices

Throughout this course we have explored individual AWS monitoring and DevOps services in depth. In this final lesson we bring everything together into a cohesive set of best practices that will help you build observable, automated, and resilient cloud workloads.

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1. Start With the Four Golden Signals

When setting up monitoring for any workload, begin with the four golden signals:

Signal	CloudWatch Implementation
Latency	ALB TargetResponseTime, API Gateway IntegrationLatency, custom app metrics
Traffic	ALB RequestCount, API Gateway Count, custom request-per-second metrics
Errors	ALB HTTPCode_Target_5XX_Count, Lambda Errors, custom error count metrics
Saturation	EC2 CPUUtilization, RDS FreeableMemory, SQS ApproximateNumberOfMessagesVisible

If you only have time to set up four alarms, make them these. They will catch the vast majority of production issues.

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2. Instrument the Three Pillars of Observability

Metrics

• Publish custom application metrics in addition to AWS-provided metrics.
• Use the Embedded Metric Format in Lambda and containers to emit metrics with zero API overhead.
• Choose percentiles (p95, p99) over averages for latency metrics.

Logs