View a markdown version of this page

Multilocation canaries - Amazon CloudWatch

Multilocation canaries

Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics lets you run the same canary across multiple AWS Regions simultaneously from a single point of management. These are called multilocation canaries. You create and manage the canary in one Region (the primary location), and CloudWatch Synthetics automatically replicates it to the additional Regions (the replica locations) that you choose. All runs, metrics, and artifacts are consolidated in the primary Region, giving you a unified view of your application's performance and availability worldwide.

Use multilocation canaries for the following benefits:

  • Ensure consistent user experience — Run canaries from different parts of the world to verify that your users everywhere receive a consistent, high-quality experience.

  • Establish location-specific baselines — Each Region might have different performance characteristics due to factors such as network latency and data center proximity. Running canaries from multiple locations creates performance baselines for each location, helping you distinguish normal variations from anomalies.

  • Identify regional performance issues — Performance and availability can vary significantly across locations due to network latency, ISP throttling, or regional outages. Testing from diverse global locations helps pinpoint Region-specific bottlenecks that might not be apparent from a single location.

  • Validate third-party services and CDNs — Verify that your third-party dependencies such as payment processors, content delivery networks, and advertisement services are working across all Regions. Use the data to hold vendors accountable for their SLAs.

  • Reduce false positives — Configure alarms that activate only when issues are detected from multiple locations. This approach avoids unnecessary notifications caused by isolated transient network glitches, so that your teams can focus on critical problems.

How multilocation canaries work

A multilocation canary uses a primary and replica model. The canary in the primary Region acts as the source of truth for configuration. CloudWatch Synthetics automatically creates replicas in your chosen Regions, and each replica runs independently using the same script, schedule, and environment variables. All mutating operations (create, update, start, stop, delete) are performed from the primary Region and asynchronously propagated to replicas. Run data from all locations is consolidated in the primary Region.

Prerequisites

Before you create a multilocation canary, consider the following requirements:

  • Multilocation canaries require runtime version syn-nodejs-puppeteer-16.0 or later, or syn-nodejs-playwright-7.0 or later.

  • Available in all AWS commercial Regions. Not available in AWS GovCloud (US) or China Regions.

  • You can add up to 50 replica locations.

  • Tags are not replicated to replica Regions. To add tags to a replica, navigate to the replica Region and add tags directly.

  • Environment variables from the primary canary are applied to all replicas.

  • All locations use the same script and schedule.

  • Each replica requires its own VPC configuration if VPC connectivity is needed. VPC settings are not inherited from the primary Region.

  • Cost scales linearly with the number of replicas. Each replica incurs the same cost as a standalone canary.

Topics