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AWS Debuts Incident Reporting in Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week introduced interactive incident reporting functionality in Amazon CloudWatch, its monitoring and observability service that provides data and actionable insights into the performance of AWS resources, applications, and services, whether running on AWS, on-premises, or in other clouds.
"The new capability, available within CloudWatch investigations, automatically gathers and correlates your telemetry data, as well as your input and any actions taken during an investigation, and produces a streamlined incident report," the company said in an Oct. 22 post, published just two days after an outage caused widespread disruptions in products and services of all kinds.
An Investigation in Amazon CloudWatch is an automated, generative AI-powered process that acts as an assistant to help engineers respond to system incidents. It leverages AI to instantly scan a system's telemetry (metrics, logs, traces) to find and correlate data relevant to the issue, quickly surfacing critical information like deployment events and providing root-cause hypotheses with visual support. This capability effectively automates the initial, time-consuming diagnostic work, providing engineers with suggested insights and data so they can focus on validating the problem and executing a fix.
AWS said the feature helps users automatically capture essential data, including operational telemetry, service configurations, and the findings from the investigation. The resulting detailed reports contain an executive summary, a timeline of events, an impact assessment, and actionable recommendations. By providing this structured post-incident analysis, these reports enable teams to better identify recurring patterns, implement preventive measures, and continuously improve their overall operational health.
Users can create their first incident report by creating a CloudWatch investigation and then clicking "Incident report," said the company, which pointed to CloudWatch incident reports documentation for more information.
The incident report generation feature is available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Spain), and Europe (Stockholm), the announcement indicated. This week's outage occurred in that first region.
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David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.