Brief Introduction to Observability on AWS
Explore the wide variety of Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability options on AWS
4 min readMar 10, 2023
APM and Observability
Observability is “the extent to which the internal states of a system can be inferred from externally available data” (Gartner). The three pillars of observability data are metrics, logs, and traces. Application Performance Monitoring (APM), a term commonly associated with observability, is “software that enables the observation and analysis of application health, performance, and user experience” (Gartner).
Additional features often associated with APM and observability products and services include the following (in alphabetical order):
- Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
- Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
- Incident Detection Response (IDR)
- Infrastructure Performance Monitoring (IPM)
- Network Device Monitoring (NDM)
- Network Performance Monitoring (NPM)
- OpenTelemetry (OTel)
- Operational (or Operations) Intelligence Platform
- Predictive Monitoring (predictive analytics / predictive modeling)
