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shiichan

CloudWatch Logs Now Sorts Your Logs by Tag!

AWS What's New ★★★ View Markdown
#aws#devops

Hey everyone, it's me, Shiichan! Today I found a nice update that makes working with logs a little easier, so let me share it.

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

Over on the AWS What's New feed, Amazon CloudWatch Logs announced that it can now enrich your log events with resource tags. That means you can filter, search, and analyze logs by the metadata that matters most to your organization, like team ownership, environment, cost center, or application name. The best part is that you don't need to change the app that emits the logs (your logging instrumentation) at all.

The story so far

Up until now, if you wanted your logs to carry context like "which team and which environment does this log belong to," you had to embed that tag information yourself in your app's log output, or build a dedicated pipeline to add it afterward. It sounds small, but it was real work.

What changes

CloudWatch Logs now adds the tags for you at ingestion time, so you don't have to add anything yourself. Enriched logs let you scope your queries by tag right away, so analysis like "show me only the logs from this app in production" becomes quick and easy. No custom pipelines, no manual tagging.

Dive Deep

You can enable it from the CloudWatch Settings console, the AWS CLI, or the AWS SDKs. It's available in all commercial AWS Regions except Middle East (UAE), Middle East (Bahrain), and Israel (Tel Aviv). And the happy part: the tag enrichment itself comes at no additional cost. For how to set it up and which telemetry is covered, check the CloudWatch documentation.

Wrap-up

  • CloudWatch Logs can now add resource tags to log events at ingestion time
  • Filter, search, and analyze logs by team, environment, cost center, app name, and more
  • No changes to your logging instrumentation, no custom pipeline, no manual work
  • No additional cost, available in all commercial Regions except a few
  • A welcome update for ops teams who want to organize lots of logs by tag, or analyze by environment and cost!

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