Monitor and Observe APIs with CloudWatch

Monitor and Observe APIs with CloudWatch

In modern serverless architecture, ensuring service quality goes beyond deployment — it heavily relies on observability. Observability allows us to understand what’s happening inside the system by collecting, analyzing, and visualizing data related to operations, performance, and failures.

🎯 Why is monitoring important?

📌 Understand system behavior

By collecting logs, recording metrics, and querying through CloudWatch Logs Insights, you can:

• Monitor request flow and execution lifecycle
• Analyze behavior of APIs and Lambda functions
• Quickly identify the root cause of issues

📌 Detect and respond to incidents early

• Integrate CloudWatch Alarms with Amazon SNS
• Automatically send email alerts when thresholds are breached
• Allow fast incident response before affecting end-users

📌 Measure performance & optimize

• Monitor key indicators: latency, invocation count, error rate
• Improve performance and scale based on data
• Align with SLA (Service Level Agreement) expectations

📌 Advanced log analysis

• Use Logs Insight for deep log querying and filtering
• Analyze real-time behavior or historical logs
• Identify patterns, frequent errors, and optimization opportunities

📚 Table of Contents

• 3.1. Preparation
  Set up resources and enable logging/tracing

• 3.2. Monitor APIs using CloudWatch Metrics
  Track API Gateway & Lambda metrics such as error rate, latency

✅ By combining logs, metrics, alarms, dashboards, and insight queries, you can build a robust observability system — empowering you to maintain quality, stability, and visibility even in serverless production environments.