AWS CloudWatch Synthetics

learn CloudWatch Synthetics

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.

notes

• 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'

resources

• CloudWatch Synthetics
• CloudWatch metrics published by canaries
• AWS::Synthetics::Canary
• aws-reinvent-trivia-game/canaries
• https://github.com/awslabs/aws-well-architected-labs/blob/main/static/Reliability/300_Fault_Isolation_with_Shuffle_Sharding/Code/regular.yaml#L575 - example cloudformation template