Using ServiceLens to monitor the health of your applications

CloudWatch ServiceLens enhances the observability of your services and applications by enabling you to integrate traces, metrics, logs, alarms, and other resource health information into one place. ServiceLens integrates CloudWatch with Amazon X-Ray to provide an end-to-end view of your application to help you more efficiently pinpoint performance bottlenecks and identify impacted users. A service map displays your service endpoints and resources as “nodes” and highlights the traffic, latency, and errors for each node and its connections. You can choose a node to see detailed insights about the correlated metrics, logs, and traces associated with that part of the service. This enables you to investigate problems and their effect on the application.

If you are signed in to an account set up as a monitoring account in CloudWatch cross-account observability, the service maps that you view includes nodes for the source accounts linked to this monitoring account. Using CloudWatch cross-account observability with ServiceLens provides you end-to-end visibility across nodes in multiple accounts calling each other through trace links. For more information, see CloudWatch cross-account observability.

To fully take advantage of ServiceLens and correlated metrics, logs, and traces, you must update the X-Ray SDK and the instrumentation of your application. ServiceLens supports logs correlation for Lambda functions, API Gateway, Java-based applications running on Amazon EC2, and Java-based applications running on Amazon EKS or Kubernetes with Container Insights deployed.