Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals introduces auto-monitor support for EKS workloads

CloudWatch Application Signals, an application performance monitoring (APM) tool that simplifies health and performance monitoring for applications, now makes instrumentation easier for your EKS applications through a single configuration flag within the Amazon CloudWatch Observability add-on. Once enabled, you can gain access to pre-built, standardized dashboards within CloudWatch Application Signals and track application performance against key business or service-level objectives (SLOs), making it easier to troubleshoot issues for your EKS applications.

SRE teams can now setup APM on CloudWatch on EKS by simply installing and configuring the Amazon CloudWatch EKS add-on, eliminating the need for manual coordination between teams and enabling rapid setup in just a few minutes. Once the add-on is installed and the flag is enabled, the add-on automatically discovers applications along with their dependencies. The add-on then instruments these applications with AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry SDKs (ADOT) to collect application metrics (throughput, latency, and errors), distributed traces and logs after the restarts.

To get started, install or upgrade the Amazon CloudWatch EKS add-on to version v4.0.0-eksbuild.1 and enable Application Signals monitoring via the new configuration flag. All service workload applications deployed in EKS are monitored by default, but you can customize the configuration to focus on specific services that matter most to your business. See documentation to learn more.

This enhancement is now available in all AWS commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions where both EKS and CloudWatch Application Signals are supported. You can now opt in to the new bundled pricing for Application Signals. For pricing, see Amazon CloudWatch pricing.