AWS CloudWatch Synthetics

code for article pfeilbr/aws-cloudwatch-synthetics-playground

You can use Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics to create canaries, configurable scripts that run on a schedule, to monitor your endpoints and APIs. Canaries follow the same routes and perform the same actions as a customer, which makes it possible for you to continually verify your customer experience even when you don’t have any customer traffic on your applications.

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supports monitoring your REST APIs, URLs, and website content every minute, 24x7, and alerts you when your application endpoints don’t behave as expected.
Node.js or python based. bundles in Puppeteer + Chromium to the runtime
trigger types - cron (1 min smallest freq), run once
can run in VPC
can also used in any workloads requiring general browser automation
creates several CloudWatch metrics in CloudWatchSynthetics namespace
EventBridge support. See monitoring canary events with Amazon EventBridge
CloudFormation support via AWS::Synthetics::Canary
if your handler has an error (e.g. throws Error(..)) that is not caught it counts as a failed canary
e.g. Canary: Type: 'AWS::Synthetics::Canary'
e.g. CanaryAlarm: Type: AWS::CloudWatch::Alarm
e.g. CanaryRole: Type: 'AWS::IAM::Role'

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resources