View your application topology and monitor operational health with the CloudWatch application map

After enabling your application for Application Signals, the application map displays nodes representing your groups. You then drill down in these groups to view your services and their dependencies. Use the application map to view the topology of your application clients, synthetics canaries, services and dependencies, and monitor operational health. To view the application map, open the CloudWatch console and choose Application Map under the Application Signals section in the left navigation pane.

After you enable your application for Application Signals, use the application map to make it easier to monitor your application's operational health:

Explore the application map

When you visit the application map, by default it shows services grouped by Related services. Related services group services based on their dependencies. For example, if Service A calls Service B, which calls Service C, they're grouped under Service A. You can view SLI health, metrics and service count for all services in each group.

Dynamic grouping and filtering

You can click the Group by dropdown to use different grouping options. By default, Application Map provides 2 groupings:

If you want to define your own custom grouping, click Manage groups to define custom groups and then tag your services or add OTEL Resource Attributes with the group key.

Default grouping in Application Signals automatically organizes services based on their downstream dependencies. The system analyzes the service dependency graph and creates groups where the root node (a service with no upstream dependencies) becomes the group name. All services that depend on this root service, either directly or indirectly, are automatically included in the group. For example, if Service A calls Service B, which in turn calls Service C, all three services will be grouped together with Service A as the group name since it's the root of the dependency chain. This automatic grouping mechanism provides a natural way to visualize and manage related services based on their actual runtime interactions and dependencies.

Group actions and insights

For each group, you can perform the following actions:

You can also use Group and filter on the left bar to filter groups which have services with deployment time, SLI health status or compute platform type.

Use the Search and filter bar to search groups by name or search groups which contain specific service environment or dependency.

Configuring custom groups

Custom grouping allows you to organize your services logically based on your business requirements and operational priorities. This feature enables you to view and save defined views prioritized by your specific needs, create groups based on team ownership, and assemble groups of services needed for critical business transactions.

Create the custom group names (the group names you will see in the UI) and the corresponding group key names. Complete this step either from the Application Signals UI or using the PutGroupingConfiguration API.

Group key names can be either, AWS tag key or OTEL resource attribute for your service. When deciding between tags and OTEL resource attributes, consider your compute platform:

Adding AWS tags

Add an AWS tag with the custom group key as a key and a value to an Amazon EKS cluster. When there are multiple services running in one Amazon EKS cluster all of them are tagged with the same custom group key. For example, when Amazon EKS Cluster A has Service 1, Service 2 and Service 3 running, adding an AWS tag with key Team X to the cluster will add all three services to Team X. To add only specific services to Team X, add OTEL resource attributes for the services as shown below.

Adding OTEL resource attributes

To add an OTEL resource attribute, see the configuration below:

General configuration

Configure the OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES environment variable in your application using the custom group key-value pairs. The keys are listed under aws.application_signals.metric_resource_keys separated by &.

For example, to create custom groups using Application=PetClinic and Owner=Test, use the following:

OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES=Application=PetClinic,Owner=Test,aws.application_signals.metric_resource_keys=Application&Owner

Platform-specific configuration

The following are the deployment specifications.

Amazon EKS and native kubernetes

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  ...
spec:
  replicas: 1
  ...
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: your-app
        image: your-app-image
        env:
          ...
          - name: OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES
            value: Application=PetClinic,Owner=Test,aws.application_signals.metric_resource_keys=Application&Owner

Amazon EC2

Add OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES to your application start script. For the complete example, see Adding OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES.

...
OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES="service.name=$YOUR_SVC_NAME,Application=PetClinic,Owner=Test,aws.application_signals.metric_resource_keys=Application&Owner" \
java -jar $MY_JAVA_APP.jar

Amazon ECS

Add OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES to the TaskDefinition. For the complete example, see Enable on Amazon ECS.

{
  "name": "my-app",
   ...
  "environment": [
    {
      "name": "OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES",
      "value": "service.name=$YOUR_SVC_NAME,Application=PetClinic,Owner=Test,aws.application_signals.metric_resource_keys=Applicationmanagement portalOwner"
    }, 
    ...
  ]
}

Lambda

Add OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES to the Lambda environment variable.

OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES="Application=PetClinic,Owner=Test,aws.application_signals.metric_resource_keys=Application&Owner"

Viewing services within groups

To view services and their dependencies in a group, click on the Group name. It will show a map of services inside the group. Each service node will show SLI health, metrics and platform details. Services with SLI breach are highlighted to be easily recognizable.

All Canaries, RUM Clients and AWS Service nodes will be collapsed by default. If services in this group call services which are not part of this group, they will also be collapsed by default.

If your map is still too large to investigate effectively, you can apply nested grouping to narrow down your investigation. For example, after grouping services by Business Unit, if you still have too many services in a group, use the Group by dropdown to select Team, creating a nested grouping structure.

Service insights and details

While on this page you can also click Save view next to search bar to save your view so next time you don't have to apply the same grouping and filtering again.

Click on View insights in service node to view Service Audit, Change events, SLI health and Metrics graphs.

If you want to view service operation and other service detail, click on view more details to go to service overview page.

Alternatively you can click on Edge to view metrics of a specific dependency call of a service.

Last deployment tracking

Track deployment activities with Application Signals' automatic processing of CloudTrail events. Monitor deployment times for services and their dependencies, providing immediate context for operational analysis and troubleshooting. Application Signals automatically correlates deployment times with performance changes, helping you quickly identify if recent deployments contributed to service issues. View deployment history and impact across your services without additional configuration or setup requirements.

Audit findings

Discover critical insights through Application Signals' audit findings. Application Signals analyzes your applications to report significant observations. These automated findings help you easily identify root cause of service health issues. Application Signals employs advanced analytics to detect patterns, highlight resource inefficiencies, and suggest optimization opportunities. Findings are prioritized based on severity and potential business impact, enabling teams to focus on the most critical issues first. Get actionable recommendations for improving service reliability and performance without manual analysis.

Choose a tab for information about exploring each kind of node and the edges (connections) between them.

View your application services

You can view your application services and the status of their SLOs and service level indicators (SLIs) in the Application Map. If you didn't create SLOs for a service, choose the Create SLO button below the service node.

The Application Map displays all of your services. It also shows the customers and canaries that consume the service and the dependencies that your services calls, as shown in the following image:

When you select a service node, a pane opens displaying detailed service information:

• Total error and fault rate.

• The number of SLIs and SLOs that are healthy or unhealthy.

• The option to view more information about an SLO.

• The Cluster, Namespace, and Workload for services hosted in Amazon EKS, or Environment for services hosted in Amazon ECS or Amazon EC2. For Amazon EKS-hosted services, choose any link to open CloudWatch Container Insights.

• AccountId and region.

• The Change section showing recent deployment history and timing.

• The Operational Audit tab providing automated audit findings and recommendations.

• Service Metrics chart of Availability, latency, fault and errors.

Select an edge or connection between a service node and a downstream service or dependency node. This opens a pane containing top paths by fault rate, latency, and error rate, as shown in the following example image. Choose any link in the pane to open the Service details page and see detailed information for the chosen service or dependency.

When you select a edge node, a pane opens displaying detailed service information:

• Total request count, latency, error rate and fault rate

• Top path by fault rate

• Top path by latency

• Top path by error rate

View dependencies

Your application dependencies are displayed on the application map, connected to the services that call them.

Choose a dependency node to open a pane containing error rate and fault rate, metrics chart for request, availability, latency, fault rate, and error rate.

View clients

After you turn on X-Ray tracing for your CloudWatch RUM web clients, they display on the application map connected to services they call.

Choose a client node to open a pane displaying detailed client information:

• Metrics for page loads, average load time, errors, and average web vitals

• A graph displaying a breakdown of errors

• A link to display the client details in CloudWatch RUM

Choose View dashboard to open the canary details.

View synthetics canaries

To view canaries on your application map, turn on turn on X-Ray tracing for your CloudWatch Synthetics canaries. Once enabled, canaries will appear connected to their called services on the application map.

The system groups canaries together by default into a single expandable icon. The detailed canary information pane displays metrics, traces, and status information.

Choose a canary node to open a pane displaying detailed canary information, as shown in the following image:

Choose View dashboard to open the canary details.