Building an AWS Observability Stack Without Paying $40k/Year for a Vendor
Open-source AWS observability with OpenTelemetry, distributed APM profiling, synthetic monitoring, SIEM, and petabyte-scale log analytics. Architecture, cost, and trade-offs.
Reliable systems require deep visibility metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and security analytics. Our Observability & Monitoring reference architectures help engineering teams build high-visibility production systems on AWS using OpenTelemetry, CloudWatch, OpenSearch, X-Ray, and serverless patterns.
Each project is free, open-source, deployment-ready, and includes diagrams, IaC code, step-by-step guides & cost info.
Observability Projects Overview
| Project | Description | Stack |
|---|---|---|
| observability-platform-opentelemetry | Full Tracing + Metrics + Logging with OpenTelemetry | AWS + OTel |
| apm-distributed-profiling | End-to-End Application Performance Monitoring | CloudWatch + X-Ray |
| synthetic-monitoring-global | 50+ Location Uptime & API Probes | Lambda + CloudWatch |
| security-information-event-management | SIEM Platform on AWS | OpenSearch + Lambda |
| log-analytics-petabyte-scale | OpenSearch + S3 Data Lake for Petabyte-scale logs | OpenSearch + S3 |
1. observability-platform-opentelemetry
GitHub - InfraTales/observability-platform-opentelemetry at infratales.com
Contribute to InfraTales/observability-platform-opentelemetry development by creating an account on GitHub.
InfraTalesStack: AWS • OpenTelemetry • ECS/EKS/EC2/Lambda compatible
Purpose
Unified observability platform with full support for metrics + logs + traces across microservices.
Highlights
- OTel Collector pipelines
- Vendor-agnostic observability layer
- Multi-environment dashboards
- Can integrate Grafana/Prometheus
2. apm-distributed-profiling
GitHub - InfraTales/apm-distributed-profiling at infratales.com
Contribute to InfraTales/apm-distributed-profiling development by creating an account on GitHub.
InfraTalesStack: CloudWatch + AWS X-Ray
Features
- Trace requests across microservices
- Root-cause latency analysis
- Profiling for production debugging
3. synthetic-monitoring-global
GitHub - InfraTales/synthetic-monitoring-global at infratales.com
Contribute to InfraTales/synthetic-monitoring-global development by creating an account on GitHub.
InfraTalesStack: Lambda + CloudWatch Events
Benefit
Simulates traffic from 50+ global locations to detect outages proactively.
4. security-information-event-management
GitHub - InfraTales/security-information-event-management at infratales.com
Contribute to InfraTales/security-information-event-management development by creating an account on GitHub.
InfraTalesStack: OpenSearch + Lambda + S3
Used For
Security event correlation & alerting system for compliance-heavy workloads.
5. log-analytics-petabyte-scale
GitHub - InfraTales/log-analytics-petabyte-scale at infratales.com
Contribute to InfraTales/log-analytics-petabyte-scale development by creating an account on GitHub.
InfraTalesStack: OpenSearch + S3
Purpose
Massive log ingestion + analysis for enterprise-scale workloads.
Monitoring is not optional; it’s foundational. These reference architectures help teams build resilient systems with real-world observability patterns, open-source repositories, & repeatable IaC deployments.
Want more architectures?
Next Topic: Security Reference Architectures
AWS Security Architectures – Zero Trust, DevSecOps & HSM
Explore AWS security reference architectures including Zero-Trust networks, DevSecOps CI/CD security pipelines, and CloudHSM for key management. Fully open-source with architecture diagrams, deployment guides, Terraform/CDK code and production best practices.
Rahul Ladumor
Have questions about a specific architecture? Reach out:
InfraTales
InfraTales has 28 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.
rahulladumor - Overview
Experienced Senior Software Developer & Architect with a passion for AWS & DevOps | Nodejs Expert | AWS Community Builder - rahulladumor
Rahul Ladumor - ASTM International | LinkedIn
👋 Hey, I'm Rahul, AWS Community Builder, three-time certified, and the guy start-ups… · Experience: ASTM International · Education: Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee · Location: Surat · 500+ connections on LinkedIn. View Rahul Ladumor’s profile on LinkedIn, a professional community of 1 billion members.
Rahul Ladumor
