# AWS observability services


AWS offers several observability solutions that can be used with the Particular Service Platform. They provide native monitoring, logging, alarming, and dashboards with Amazon CloudWatch, tracing through AWS X-Ray, and other open-source-based managed services. Together, these provide the three pillars of [observability signals](https://opentelemetry.io/docs/concepts/signals/).

## Amazon CloudWatch

[Amazon CloudWatch](https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/) is a monitoring and observability service that allows the collection and access of performance and operational data in the form of logs and metrics on a single platform.

:heavy_plus_sign: Pros:

- Single tool to visualize metrics and logs emitted by the system
- Fully managed service
- Tightly integrated with other AWS services
- Supports querying data from multiple sources to monitor metrics from AWS, on-premises, or other cloud providers
- Customizable dashboards with automated alarms and remediating actions
- Real-time telemetry

:heavy_minus_sign: Cons:

- Does not support traces
- [Costs](https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/pricing/) can escalate with increased usage

The Particular Service Platform collects metrics in two forms:

1. OpenTelemetry-based metrics - can be collected by [enabling OpenTelemetry](/nservicebus/operations/opentelemetry.md) and exporting the metrics to Amazon CloudWatch.
1. Custom metrics with `NServiceBus.Metrics` - can be exported to Amazon CloudWatch.

## Amazon X-Ray

[Amazon X-Ray](https://aws.amazon.com/xray/) is a service that can receive trace data from applications. The trace data can provide insights to help identify the root cause of failures, hard-to-detect issues or side effects, and performance bottlenecks.

:heavy_plus_sign: Pros:

- Single tool to visualize application-level and infrastructure-level traces
- Creates a service map using trace data
- Tightly integrated with other AWS services
- Fully managed service

:heavy_minus_sign: Cons:

- [Costs](https://aws.amazon.com/xray/pricing/) can escalate with increased usage

The Particular Service Platform allows observability tools to capture spans emitted by NServiceBus, providing insights into how messages are being processed.

[**Try the OpenTelemetry sample with export to Amazon X-Ray →**](https://github.com/lailabougria/talks/tree/main/message-processing-failed-but-whats-the-root-cause/samples/aws)

## Additional resources

[Message processing failed... But what's the root cause?](https://particular.net/videos/message-processing-failed)

In this presentation, Laila Bougria discusses the need for distributed tracing in distributed systems, as well as the [ADOT collector (AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry Collector)](https://aws-otel.github.io/docs/getting-started/collector), AWS’ OpenTelemetry Collector implementation that simplifies exporting distributed traces from applications to AWS X-Ray, among others.

The [AWS Loan Broker showcase](/samples/showcase/loan-broker-showcase/index.md) demonstrates how to integrate the Particular Service Platform and OpenTelemetry metrics and traces when hosting solutions in AWS.