Application Signals

Monitor application health in real time

Track performance against business goals

View relationships between services and dependencies

Quickly identify and resolve performance issues

Enable Application Signals to automatically collect metrics and traces from your applications, and display key metrics such as call volume, availability, latency, faults, and errors. Quickly see and triage current operational health, and whether your applications are meeting their longer-term performance goals, without writing custom code or creating dashboards.

Create and monitor service-level objectives (SLOs) with Application Signals. Easily create and track status of SLOs related to CloudWatch metrics, including the new standard application metrics that Application Signals collects. See and track the service level indicator (SLI) status of your application services within a services list and topology map. Create alarms to track your SLOs, and track the new standard application metrics that Application Signals collects.

See a map of your application topology that Application Signals automatically discovers, that gives you a visual representation of your applications, dependencies, and their connectivity.

Application Signals works with CloudWatch RUM, CloudWatch Synthetics canaries, Amazon Service Catalog AppRegistry, and Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling to display your client pages, Synthetics canaries, and application names within dashboards and maps.

Use Application Signals for daily application monitoring – Use Application Signals within the CloudWatch console, as part of daily application monitoring:

Using Application Signals incurs charges. For information about CloudWatch pricing, see Amazon CloudWatch Pricing.

Application Signals cross-account – With Application Signals cross-account observability, you can monitor and troubleshoot your applications that span multiple Amazon accounts within a single Region.

You can use Amazon CloudWatch Observability Access Manager to set up one or more of your Amazon accounts as a monitoring account. You’ll provide the monitoring account with the ability to view data in your source account by creating a sink in your monitoring account. You use the sink to create a link from your source account to your monitoring account. For more information, see CloudWatch cross-account observability.

For proper functionality of Application Signals cross-account observability, ensure that the following telemetry types are shared through the CloudWatch Observability Access Manager.

Dynamic service grouping and filtering – Group and filter services with Application Signals' dynamic grouping capabilities. Automatically aggregate metrics and SLIs of services within groups, allowing you to start from a group view and dive deep into specific problematic areas. Application Signals provides two default groupings: "Environment" grouping that organizes by service environment, and "Related services" grouping that groups services based on their dependencies. For example, in Related services grouping, if Service A calls Service B, which calls Service C, they're grouped under Service A. Beyond default groupings, create custom groups by selecting services that align with your organizational needs, such as Business unit or Team.

Create custom groupings using Amazon tags or OpenTelemetry attributes that align with your team structure, business domains, or operational requirements. Custom groupings enable you to organize services according to your specific monitoring and troubleshooting workflows. For more information, see Configuring custom groups.

Change Events – Track change events across your application with Application Signals' automatic processing of CloudTrail events. Monitor configuration and deployment events for services and their dependencies, providing immediate context for operational analysis and troubleshooting. Change event detection is enabled alongside service discovery enablement through the CloudWatch Console or StartDiscovery API. For Amazon EKS services, deployment detection requires that the Amazon EKS services are instrumented with the Application Signals instrumentation SDK.

Change events are supported for the following resources:

Automated audit findings – Discover critical insights through Application Signals' automated audit findings. The service analyzes your applications to report significant observations and potential problems, simplifying root cause analysis. These automated findings consolidate relevant traces, eliminating the need to navigate through multiple clicks. The audit system helps teams quickly identify issues and their underlying causes, enabling faster problem resolution.

Application Signals employs advanced analytics to detect patterns, highlight resource inefficiencies, and suggest optimization opportunities. Findings are prioritized based on severity and potential business impact, enabling teams to focus on the most critical issues first. Get actionable recommendations for improving service reliability and performance without manual analysis.