Monitoring and Observability of Lambdas with Cloudwatch and Powertools @ Community Day Midwest 2025

Description

AWS Community Day Midwest 2025 Monitoring and Observability of Lambdas with Cloudwatch and Powertools In this talk, I dive into a topic that almost always becomes critical right after a deployment: monitoring and observability for AWS Lambda. While traditional workloads (like EC2) give us plenty of built-in visibility, serverless applications often stop at the default Lambda metrics—invocations, duration, and errors—leaving a huge blind spot around what is actually happening inside the code. That’s where observability really matters. This session focuses on how we can improve monitoring and observability insights in serverless implementations using AWS Lambda, Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS Lambda Powertools. We’ll break down the core concepts and pillars of observability—logs, metrics, and traces—and show how to analyze and correlate them effectively. The goal is to consolidate this data into an integrated, decision-driven dashboard in AWS, instead of endlessly scrolling through log streams trying to find a single error message. What you’ll see in the live demo: Using a simple serverless application (CloudFront + Lambda + DynamoDB) we progressively improve visibility by: - Migrating from noisy print() statements to structured JSON logs - Adding request and session context to correlate events - Emitting custom business metrics with namespaces and dimensions - Building a CloudWatch dashboard that reflects real system health - Defining practical SLOs and alarms (for example, success rate thresholds) Key takeaways: - Monitoring vs. observability—and why they are not the same - How structured logs and custom metrics unlock faster troubleshooting - How to stop debugging reactively and start understanding system behavior - How to rapidly implement observability best practices in real serverless architectures With the help of a live demonstration, we walk step by step through these implementations, giving you practical, production-ready knowledge you can immediately apply to improve the reliability and operability of your serverless systems. #AWS #AWSUserGroup #AWSCommunity #CloudComputing #CloudNative #TechCommunity #Serverless #Lambda #CloudWatch #Observability #Monitoring #DevOps #SRE #Powertools #DynamoDB #S3 #Terraform #IaC #InfrastructureAsCode