Monitoring Deep Dive·0/74 min
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🔭Observability Overview·5 min readModule 1 of 11
Observability Overview
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Monitoring & Observability
Metrics, logs, traces, and events — CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and EventBridge turn raw signals into alarms and automated responses.
~74 min total11 modules10 quiz questionsDOP-C02 High priority
Observability is the ability to understand what your system is doing from the outside — by examining its outputs. AWS provides a full observability stack: metrics, logs, traces, and event-driven alerting. This module maps the landscape before we go deep on each service.
The Three Pillars of Observability
Click each to see which AWS service handles it
The Monitoring Trifecta — Most Important Table
Three services answer three different questions. The exam loves testing whether you can distinguish them:
CloudWatch
WHAT is happening?
CPU is at 98%, error rate spiked
Config
WHAT CHANGED?
Security group was modified
CloudTrail
WHO did it?
User "admin@corp" called ModifySecurityGroup
💡When an exam question describes an incident, ask: do they need to know what's happening now(CloudWatch), what configuration changed (Config), or who made the change (CloudTrail)? Often the right answer is a combination.
Service Map
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CloudWatch Metrics
Numeric time-series from AWS services and your apps
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CloudWatch Alarms
Threshold watchers that trigger actions or notifications
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CloudWatch Logs
Log storage, search, metric extraction, and streaming
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CloudTrail
Immutable audit log of every AWS API call
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EventBridge
Event-driven routing — react to service events in real time
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X-Ray
Distributed tracing — request flows across microservices