Introduction

A 5xx alarm that goes off in the middle of the night is a good test for AWS DevOps Agent: how much of the work of isolating the cause can it take over? In this hands-on article, I use an ALB HTTPCode_Target_5XX_Count alarm to find out.

The question to isolate is whether the cause is in the backend (the app on ECS) or in the database (Aurora).

Traditionally, the person who receives the alarm moves back and forth between ALB metrics, application logs, and Aurora metrics and Performance Insights to find the cause. I check how much of this work can be handed to AWS DevOps Agent, using two failure scenarios whose causes sit in different layers.

Test Environment and Scenarios

Environment

I assume that an Agent Space for DevOps Agent has already been created.…