🔍 OpenShift and AWS Application Observability: A Practical Guide

When running applications on Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), it's essential to have visibility into application performance and behavior. That means being able to see logs, track metrics, and respond quickly when something goes wrong.

Luckily, AWS offers native tools like Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus that you can integrate directly with ROSA — giving you a powerful observability setup with minimal overhead.

Let’s break down how it works and what you need to do.

🧠 Why Observability Matters in ROSA

Applications on ROSA often:

• Span multiple services and microservices
• Handle production workloads in real time
• Need quick insights for debugging, scaling, and optimizing

Observability helps by:

• Sending logs to CloudWatch for centralized viewing
• Exporting metrics to Prometheus so you can monitor and alert on app health

🔧 What You Can Set Up

Here’s what you’ll configure in a typical observability setup on ROSA:

✅ 1. Forward Application Logs to Amazon CloudWatch

This lets you:

• Centralize all logs in one place
• Search and analyze logs with CloudWatch Logs Insights
• Set alerts on specific error patterns or activity

✅ 2. Export Metrics to Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus

This gives you:

• A scalable, secure Prometheus backend without the need to manage infrastructure
• The ability to visualize metrics using Amazon Managed Grafana (or any compatible dashboard)

🛠 How It Works (At a High Level)

For Logs:

• Use a log forwarding agent (like Fluent Bit or Fluentd) already available in OpenShift logging stack
• Configure it to send logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs
• Logs are grouped by namespace, pod, or application for easy filtering

For Metrics:

• OpenShift workloads expose Prometheus-compatible metrics
• Use the Prometheus Remote Write feature to push data to Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus
• Configure labels for apps, namespaces, clusters — for better segmentation

🧩 Integration Steps Overview (No Code View)

You (or your admin) would typically:

1. Enable CloudWatch and Prometheus services in your AWS account
2. Set IAM permissions to allow ROSA components to push logs and metrics
3. Install logging and monitoring operators in OpenShift via OperatorHub
4. Configure outputs in OpenShift’s web console or using YAML to point logs to CloudWatch and metrics to Prometheus
5. Visualize everything using tools like CloudWatch dashboards or Amazon Managed Grafana

These steps are well-documented by Red Hat and AWS, and usually involve guided configuration—not custom scripting.

📊 What You Get in Return

• Unified view of logs and metrics
• Faster troubleshooting with real-time data
• Alerting and visualization built-in
• A cloud-native, managed observability stack — no need to maintain Prometheus or Elasticsearch clusters yourself

🚀 Final Thoughts

Observability isn’t optional anymore. By integrating Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus with your ROSA clusters, you get a robust, scalable way to monitor your applications.

It keeps your dev and ops teams informed, your apps performant, and your production issues easier to solve.

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