Amazon CloudWatch was introduced way back in 2009 to help AWS customers view data about their cloud usage and spending. Today at the dawn of AWS re:Invent, the company’s cloud customer conference taking place in Las Vegas this week, the cloud division announced a couple of enhancements to the product.
Amazon has been building on the types of data provided by CloudWatch, and today it added user monitoring. With Real User Monitoring, AWS customers can understand when there is a problem with a deployment and take corrective action before customers really begin to feel it.
“Amazon CloudWatch RUM will help you to collect the metrics that give you the insights that will help you to identify, understand, and improve this experience. You simply register your application, add a snippet of JavaScript to the header of each page and deploy,” Amazon’s Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post announcing the feature.
This doesn’t exactly fall under the category of stunning innovation. It’s something companies like AppDynamics and New Relic have been doing for years, but as with most things Amazon they are providing a soup-to-nuts experience for customers inside AWS, and this type of monitoring lets you know when things could be going wrong with your AWS application.
The other new feature is a new experiments tool called CloudWatch Evidently, which helps developers set feature flags and run A/B tests inside an application they are building on top of AWS. Rather than just updating an app for every user, developers may want to test it on a limited subset of users and see if the new feature breaks anything, or if users prefer a particular approach or design more.
They can limit the people who see a new feature by setting a feature flag in the code and setting up the parameters for that feature. In addition, you can do A/B testing, another form of experimentation, that lets you test features with a certain subset of users to see which feature or design people prefer.
Neither of these is new either. Companies like Split.io have been doing more broad feature flag management for some time, and companies like Optimizely have been building companies around A/B testing.
CloudWatch Evidently is already available in 9 Amazon cloud regions with pay-as-you-go pricing, while CloudWatch RUM is also available now in 10 regions at a cost of $1 per 100,000 events collected.
