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Discussion on: AWS Serverless: you might not need third party monitoring

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theburningmonk profile image
Yan Cui

CW Logs Insights has lots of functional limitations (ie. what it CAN do, not considering DX issues like the query syntax being too verbose for searching string fragments) and is not sufficient for a lot of people's needs, e.g.

  • you're limited to 20 log groups at a time, so you need to know roughly what you're looking for to begin with
  • you can only search logs for functions in one region and one account, many orgs run multiple accounts (in fact, this is AWS's recommended practice) and need a log aggregation platform that aggregates everything, CW Logs can't do that at the moment

The same goes to all the other services, in general, they're good enough when you're starting out but most people grow out of them and need something more capable. X-Ray for example, has poor support for async event sources (only SNS is supported right now), so if you have an event-driven architecture it's of very limited use.

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byrro profile image
Renato Byrro

These limits are indeed a pain. It would be relatively simple to deploy a Lambda with logic to overcome the Log Group and Region limitations. But then the team would start deviating from the core business. In most enterprise projects it will make more sense to pay someone that can do it well.

AWS is focused on providing infrastructure. CW handles the infra really well for collecting and storing logs. Swifting through and analyzing them is another business, from my point of view...