CloudWatch alarm debugging, root cause analysis, and AWS operations for small teams.
The step-by-step CloudWatch investigation workflow that replaces a missing SRE.
7 min read
The three changes that consistently push MTTR below 5 minutes on small teams.
5 min read
Why WhatsApp's simplicity beats a full incident dashboard at 3am.
4 min read
A breakdown of hidden costs that most startup founders underestimate.
6 min read
The honest comparison of what each tool does well — and what you actually need at under 20 engineers.
8 min read
A simple rotation structure that works when everyone is also the engineer on-call.
5 min read
Every CloudWatch alarm your AWS infrastructure needs — ECS, EC2, RDS, Lambda, ALB, API Gateway, SQS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, and cost alerts.
15 min read
What to do in the first 5 minutes — and why most engineers spend 30 minutes doing it.
6 min read
Five phases, one goal: from the moment an alarm fires to the post-mortem that stops it happening again.
12 min read
How to combine multiple CloudWatch alarms into a single signal that only fires when users are actually affected.
10 min read
A curated list of the alarms that catch real incidents — with exact thresholds, a CloudFormation template, and the decision rules that separate signal from noise.
9 min read
A self-resolving alarm isn't automatically harmless. Here's how to tell the difference between noise and a real problem cycling through the same failure.
7 min read
The alarm configurations that look correct in documentation but page your team 40 times a month for nothing — and the exact fixes.
9 min read
The queries that find root cause in under 2 minutes — organised by AWS service, ready to copy.
10 min read
Six metric math patterns — error rates, saturation %, compound conditions — that static thresholds can't express.
11 min read
Composite alarms don't lower your CloudWatch bill — they add to it. Here's how alarm billing actually works, and what actually cuts it.
9 min read
Most post-mortem templates are too long to survive contact with a busy team. This one is 5 questions, one page, and it's the 5 that actually prevent recurrence.
8 min read
Most cold start guides still blame VPC for 1-10s of latency. That was true before 2019. Here's what actually drives Lambda cold start time now, and which of the three real mitigations is worth it.
10 min read
The 3am page that wasn't actionable trained your team to ignore their phone. Here's the alert-to-action ratio, the five anti-patterns behind it, and how to fix the alarms instead of hiring.
9 min read
Most SQS monitoring guides start with queue depth. Start with ApproximateAgeOfOldestMessage instead — it's the metric that actually tells you when messages are about to be lost.
9 min read
AWS itself is moving away from dashboards toward agents that read your telemetry and tell you what's wrong. Here's what actually shipped in 2025-2026 — and what it means if you don't have a platform team to wire it together.
10 min read
CloudWatch's custom metric pricing looks trivial until dimensions, per-instance breakdowns, and high-resolution publishing multiply it. Here's the exact tier structure and the one thing that actually drives the bill.
8 min read
Most small AWS teams have solid CPU and error alarms and zero security alarms — because GuardDuty is off by default and CloudTrail logs nobody's watching don't alert anyone. Here's what to enable, what it costs, and the exact alarms CIS recommends.
9 min read
Metrics, Logs Insights, traces, and Contributor Insights each have their own console tab, their own query language, and their own time-range picker. Here's what AWS actually built to unify them, and what to do without a platform team.
8 min read
The CloudFormation stack with your CloudWatch alarms doesn't automatically deploy to the account your team spins up six months later. Here's how coverage silently drifts across AWS Organizations, and what CloudWatch's cross-account observability actually fixes.
8 min read
It doesn't mean less monitoring — it means monitoring that a generalist engineering team can actually maintain in spare cycles. A five-part checklist covering infrastructure, security, cost, multi-account, and investigation tooling.
9 min read
Three services, one word — "audit" — and most guides never clarify that they answer three completely different questions. CloudWatch tells you how the system is performing, CloudTrail tells you who did it, Config tells you what changed. Here's the difference, with a real incident walked through all three.
9 min read
EC2's default metrics stop at CPU, network, and status checks — memory and disk usage are invisible until you install the CloudWatch Agent. Here's the exact config.json, the IAM policy required, and the alarms to set once it's running.
9 min read
Most teams brace for the Logs Insights query bill and never notice ingestion is what's actually driving the cost. Here's the real per-GB pricing for each stage, verified against AWS's own pricing page, and a worked example showing where the money goes.
8 min read