Investigating Service Issues with Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals Custom Metrics

This article explains how to integrate custom business metrics with Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals to correlate technical performance issues with business impact during service disruptions.

• CloudWatch Application Signals automatically captures RED metrics (Request Rate, Errors, Duration)
• Custom business metrics reveal revenue impact that infrastructure monitoring alone cannot show
• Unified dashboards display technical performance and business context in one view
• Four real-world scenarios demonstrate custom metrics across Lambda, ECS, EKS, and EC2 services
• High-impact metrics include transaction values, payment success rates, and inventory availability
• Custom metrics use OpenTelemetry resource attributes for service topology correlation
• Cost depends on metric frequency and volume; start with essential metrics and expand gradually

By connecting business metrics with technical data, teams can prioritize fixes based on actual revenue impact rather than technical severity alone.