Use natural language to query Amazon CloudWatch logs and metrics (preview)

To make it easy to interact with your operational data, Amazon CloudWatch is introducing today natural language query generation for Logs and Metrics Insights. With this capability, powered by generative artificial intelligence (AI), you can describe in English the insights you are looking for, and a Logs or Metrics Insights query will be automatically generated. This feature provides three main capabilities for CloudWatch Logs and Metrics Insights: Generate new queries from a description or a question to help you get started easily. Query explanation to help you learn the language including more advanced features. Refine existing queries using guided iterations. Let’s see how these work in practice with a few examples. I’ll cover logs first and then metrics. Generate CloudWatch…

Check your AWS Free Tier usage programmatically with a new API

Starting today, you can check your usage of the AWS Free Tier using the new AWS Free Tier API. You can use the API directly with the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) or integrate it into an application with the AWS SDKs. The AWS Free Tier program provides you with the ability to explore and try out AWS services free of charge up to specified limits for each service. The AWS Free Tier includes three different types of offerings: Always free offers allow customers to use a service for free up to specified limits as long as they are an AWS customer. 12 months free offers allow customers to use a service for free up to specified limits for one…

Use Amazon CloudWatch to consolidate hybrid, multicloud, and on-premises metrics

You can now consolidate metrics from your hybrid, multicloud, and on-premises data sources using Amazon CloudWatch and process them in a consistent, unified fashion. You can query, visualize, and alarm on any and all of the metrics, regardless of their source. In addition to giving you a unified view, this new feature will help you to identify trends and issues that span multiple parts and aspects of your infrastructure. When I first heard about this new feature, I thought, “Wait, I can do that with PutMetricData, what’s the big deal?” Quite a bit, as it turns out. PutMetricData stores the metrics in CloudWatch, but this cool new feature fetches them on demand, directly from the source. Instead of storing data,…

Announcing cross-region data replication for Amazon WorkSpaces

You can now use cross-region data replication to provide business continuity for your Amazon WorkSpaces users. Snapshots are taken every 12 hours, replicated to the desired destination region, and are used to provide a recovery point objective (RPO) of 12-24 hours. Multi-Region Resilience Review In her 2022 post Advancing business continuity with Amazon WorkSpaces Multi-Region Resilience, my colleague Ariel introduced you to the initial version of this feature and showed you how to use it to set up standby virtual desktops available for your users. After it has been set up, users log in with Amazon WorkSpaces registration codes that include fully qualified domain names (FQDNs). If the WorkSpaces in the primary region are unavailable, the users are redirected to…