Posted On: Aug 23, 2021

CloudWatch Synthetics now supports visual monitoring, allowing you to catch visual defects on your web application’s end user experience. CloudWatch Synthetics supports monitoring your REST APIs, URLs, and website content by running scripts 24/7. The new visual monitoring feature makes it possible to catch visual defects that cannot be scripted.

Canaries are modular, lightweight scripts that you can configure to run on a schedule in order to monitor your endpoints and APIs from the outside in. Canaries simulate the same actions as a user, which makes it possible for you to monitor your user experience continuously. The new visual monitoring capability compares screenshots taken during a canary run with a baseline for visual discrepancy. You can view the differences and get alerted if the discrepancy is beyond a preset threshold. You can enable the visual monitoring feature on your existing or new Node.js canaries. You can also add boundaries for excluding expected changes. The visual monitoring feature is powered by the ImageMagick open source software toolkit.

To learn more about this feature, see the CloudWatch Synthetics documentation. For pricing, refer to Amazon CloudWatch pricing.