With impeccable timing, AWS debuts automated cloud incident report generator
We could really have used this a couple of days ago, guys
In the same week that a massive outage of its own cloud inconvenienced millions of customers, AWS has delivered an improved interactive incident reporting service to help its customers explain what happened when their cloud-hosted resources strike trouble.
The service is an enhancement to the CloudWatch tool that AWS promotes as just the thing to monitor your own AWS apps and resources in real time as it “offers many tools to give you system-wide observability of your application performance, operational health, and resource utilization.”
On Wednesday, AWS announced that the tool “now offers interactive incident report generation, enabling customers to create comprehensive post-incident analysis reports in minutes.”
We’re told the new service “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.”
“Using the new feature you can automatically capture critical operational telemetry, service configurations, and investigation findings to generate detailed reports,” AWS adds. “Reports include executive summaries, timeline of events, impact assessments, and actionable recommendations. These reports help you better identify patterns, implement preventive measures, and continuously improve your operational posture through structured post incident analysis.”
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The Register imagines plenty of AWS customers – and perhaps AWS itself – would have found this mighty useful earlier this week during the DynamoDB debacle that disrupted numerous online services and betrayed the changing nature of the Amazonian workforce.
One of Amazon’s rivals in the observability caper – Datadog – has slightly better timing as on Tuesday it launched a free site that provides status updates on dozens of major SaaS platforms and 13 AWS services. Datadog told The Register it spotted the DynamoDB disaster 32 minutes before AWS posted its first info about the matter, suggesting the cloud giant really missed a trick by releasing the CloudWatch upgrade a day later. ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
