AWS re:Invent 2025 - Comprehensive observability with Mobile RUM and Application Map (COP364)

Comprehensive Observability with Mobile RUM and Application Map

Overview of Application Signals

• Application Signals is AWS's application performance monitoring (APM) solution
• It provides visibility into the health and performance of services running in your AWS environment
• Tracks key "golden metrics" for requests, errors, faults, and duration/latency
• Uses distributed tracing based on open standards like OpenTelemetry
• Allows connecting technical metrics to business-level service level objectives (SLOs)

Application Map

• Provides a visual topology map of your application architecture
• Automatically discovers and groups related services, even those not directly instrumented
• Allows custom grouping by tags, attributes, or other criteria (e.g. by application, tier, team)
• Displays health status and performance metrics for each service component
• Enables drilling down into individual services to see dependencies, traces, and operational insights

Mobile Real User Monitoring (RUM)

• Extends observability to mobile apps (iOS and Android)
• Captures real user experience metrics like load times, crashes, and errors
• Provides comprehensive dashboards for mobile app performance and health
• Correlates mobile user activity with backend service performance

Operational Auditing

• Proactively identifies potential issues and bottlenecks in the application
• Surfaces relevant traces, logs, and error messages to aid root cause analysis
• Can be accessed directly from developer IDEs like IntelliJ and VS Code

Tracing and Logging Integration

• Application Signals connects traces, logs, and metrics together for full-stack observability
• Stores transaction traces as logs for easy searching and analysis
• Suggests relevant log groups and fields based on discovered services

Business Impact

• Provides a unified view of application health and performance across services, tiers, and teams
• Enables faster troubleshooting and root cause analysis by surfacing key insights
• Improves end-user experience by identifying and resolving mobile app issues
• Supports proactive monitoring and operational auditing to stay ahead of problems
• Integrates seamlessly with developer workflows for efficient remediation

Key Features and Capabilities

• Automatic discovery and grouping of related services
• Custom grouping by tags, attributes, or other criteria
• Detailed service health metrics and performance data
• Mobile RUM for iOS and Android apps
• Operational auditing and proactive issue identification
• Trace, log, and metric integration for full-stack observability
• Developer IDE integration for efficient troubleshooting

Example Use Cases

• Quickly identify performance bottlenecks or errors across a complex, distributed application
• Understand the end-user experience for a mobile app and correlate it with backend service health
• Proactively monitor for potential issues and get ahead of problems before they impact customers
• Efficiently troubleshoot and resolve issues by connecting traces, logs, and metrics in one place
• Optimize application architecture and resource utilization based on observed usage patterns