3.2. Monitoring & Debugging Applications

Monitoring and debugging are critical for developers to understand how their applications perform in production, identify issues quickly, and ensure a smooth user experience.

The First Principle is that effective application monitoring and debugging rely on comprehensive visibility into application behavior, leveraging metrics, logs, and traces to proactively detect issues and rapidly identify root causes. This transforms reactive firefighting into data-driven problem-solving.

This section explores core AWS services that developers use for monitoring and debugging their applications. You'll learn about collecting application metrics and logs with Amazon CloudWatch, tracing distributed requests with AWS X-Ray, and applying systematic debugging strategies.

The focus is on comprehending how to set up these tools and use them to gain insights into your application's runtime behavior, which is crucial for the DVA-C02 exam.

Scenario: Your application is deployed to production, but users are reporting intermittent errors. You need to quickly identify the source of these errors within your code or its interaction with AWS services.

Reflection Question: How do comprehensive monitoring and debugging practices, leveraging AWS services for metrics, logs, and traces, enable you to proactively detect issues and rapidly identify root causes in your applications running on AWS?