AWS field guide
Design observability around user impact
Start from user-visible outcomes, then connect the minimum useful metrics, traces, and logs to those objectives.
Use this pattern when
A distributed workload has several dependencies or failures are difficult to reproduce.
Reference architecture
Responsibilities and controls, not a deployment template.
User request
Outcome to protect
AWS X-Ray
Correlation and traces
Amazon CloudWatch
Metrics and structured logs
Service objective
Latency and errors
CloudWatch alarm
Owned, actionable signal
Decisions that shape the pattern
- Define a small set of service-level indicators.
- Use structured logs with correlation IDs.
- Sample high-volume traces intentionally.
Security boundaries
- Redact sensitive fields before logging.
- Restrict log access and exports.
- Set retention by operational and compliance need.
Reliability posture
- Alert on symptoms before causes.
- Test alerts and runbooks.
- Keep telemetry failure from breaking the workload.
Starter implementation
Start from deployable infrastructure
Review every permission, limit, Region, and cost assumption before production.
import { Duration, Stack, StackProps } from 'aws-cdk-lib';
import * as apigateway from 'aws-cdk-lib/aws-apigateway';
import * as athena from 'aws-cdk-lib/aws-athena';
import * as bedrock from 'aws-cdk-lib/aws-bedrock';
import * as budgets from 'aws-cdk-lib/aws-budgets';
import * as cloudfront from 'aws-cdk-lib/aws-cloudfront';
import * as origins from 'aws-cdk-lib/aws-cloudfront-origins';
import * as cloudtrail from 'aws-cdk-lib/aws-cloudtrail';
import * as cloudwatch from 'aws-cdk-lib/aws-cloudwatch';
import * as dynamodb from 'aws-cdk-lib/aws-dynamodb';
import * as ecs from 'aws-cdk-lib/aws-ecs';
import * as patterns from 'aws-cdk-lib/aws-ecs-patterns';
import * as events from 'aws-cdk-lib/aws-events';
import * as targets from 'aws-cdk-lib/aws-events-targets';
import * as glue from 'aws-cdk-lib/aws-glue';
import * as iam from 'aws-cdk-lib/aws-iam';
import * as kms from 'aws-cdk-lib/aws-kms';
import * as lambda from 'aws-cdk-lib/aws-lambda';
import * as sources from 'aws-cdk-lib/aws-lambda-event-sources';
import * as s3 from 'aws-cdk-lib/aws-s3';
import * as secretsmanager from 'aws-cdk-lib/aws-secretsmanager';
import * as sqs from 'aws-cdk-lib/aws-sqs';
import { Construct } from 'constructs';
export class PatternStack extends Stack {
constructor(scope: Construct, id: string, props?: StackProps) {
super(scope, id, props);
const errors = new cloudwatch.Metric({
namespace: 'AWSMindset/Workload', metricName: 'UserVisibleErrors', statistic: 'Sum',
});
const alarm = new cloudwatch.Alarm(this, 'HighErrorRate', {
metric: errors, threshold: 5, evaluationPeriods: 2,
treatMissingData: cloudwatch.TreatMissingData.NOT_BREACHING,
});
const dashboard = new cloudwatch.Dashboard(this, 'Operations');
dashboard.addWidgets(new cloudwatch.GraphWidget({ title: 'User-visible errors', left: [errors] }));
}
}
Before production
Adoption checklist
- 01Define the user outcome.
- 02Choose latency and error indicators.
- 03Propagate correlation IDs.
- 04Set log retention.
- 05Attach an owner and runbook to every alert.
From the journal
Related field notes
Selected from service names and architecture signals used by this pattern.
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