AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT)

AWS Managed Services Provider (MSP) — 24/7 monitoring, patching, security, cost optimization, and incident response.

AWS DevOps consulting — CI/CD pipeline setup, infrastructure as code (SAM/CDK), and deployment automation.

Scalable, cost-efficient applications with AWS serverless — Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, Step Functions. Consulting from an AWS Select Tier Partner.

The reflex to bolt Amazon Managed Prometheus + Grafana onto every workload is how observability bills quietly double. CloudWatch Application Signals now gives you an auto-discovered service map, SLOs, and traces with near-zero setup; AMP only earns its keep when you are PromQL-native or drowning in high-cardinality metrics — where ingestion (not retention) is the cost driver. Here is the decision matrix, an ADOT dual-export config, and the three levers that actually cut the AMP bill.

CloudWatch is the most underused service on every AWS bill — and the most overspent on the ones that take it seriously. Logs, metrics, and alarm patterns that catch real outages without burying you in noise (or in the bill).

A 500ms latency spike in a distributed system could be a slow RDS query, a Lambda cold start, a downstream API timeout, or a CloudWatch Logs ingestion delay. Finding the cause requires correlated logs, traces, and metrics — not grep.

That `user_id` label on every HTTP metric turns Amazon Managed Prometheus into a five-figure line item. This guide explains cardinality mechanics, EMF vs remote write, and Application Signals defaults worth disabling.