Accelerating observability outcomes - AWS Prescriptive Guidance
Intended audienceObjectives

Accelerating observability outcomes

Jyothi Madanlal, Abhaya Chauhan, and Jose Augusto Ferronato, Amazon Web Services

July 2025 (document history)

Dr. Werner Vogels, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Amazon, once said, “Everything fails, all the time... so plan for failure and nothing will fail” (AWS re:Invent 2024 keynote presentation). Adopting this mindset is at the heart of an effective and robust observability implementation.

This strategy document explores how you can elevate your observability posture to create more resilient and efficient systems. It also discusses how you can define an anchor objective (North Star) that provides effective alignment across your organization, which leads to increased customer trust, brand reputation, and team morale. The document highlights the key things to consider and a recommended approach to accelerating observability outcomes. This approach includes unlocking new business opportunities, delivering better user experiences, optimizing performance and cost, and improving operational efficiencies across your organization. Regardless of the maturity of your observability implementation, this document provides incremental and actionable insights in the pursuit of your observability goals.

Intended audience

This information is intended for the following audiences:

  • Technical leaders and architects who are responsible for defining an observability strategy

  • Engineering managers and DevOps leaders who are responsible for overseeing operational excellence

  • Platform engineering teams that are responsible for building observability foundations

  • Site reliability engineers (SREs) who are responsible for implementing the observability practices

Objectives

The information in this guide helps you elevate your observability practices to create more resilient and efficient systems that are aligned across your organization. It provides you with a framework for adopting good observability practices across three pillars: people, process, and technology. The information is broadly applicable regardless of the tools you choose to use. If you are interested in the AWS services that support observability, see Monitoring and observability on the AWS website.