Application Performance Monitoring Enabled by Default in CloudWatch Observability EKS Add-on

Today, Amazon CloudWatch Observability EKS add-on version 5.0.0 automatically enables CloudWatch Application Signals — Amazon's application performance monitoring (APM) capability — for all new installations and upgrades, eliminating the previous manual opt-in step. Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a managed Kubernetes service that simplifies running containerized applications at scale. The CloudWatch Observability add-on for EKS extends native Kubernetes observability by integrating Enhanced Container Insights, Container Logs, and now Application Signals directly into your clusters. The Observability add-on automatically instruments your services to collect traces, metrics, and logs for a unified, application-centric view. For DevOps engineers, platform teams, and developers who needed application-level visibility into their EKS-hosted services — such as service latency, error rates, and request traces — this change closes that gap by making those capabilities available out of the box, so teams can focus on building and operating applications rather than configuring observability tooling.azon EKS.

With Application Signals now enabled by default, customers immediately benefit from automatic service instrumentation — no manual configuration or Kubernetes workload annotations required — along with pre-built dashboards that surface application performance metrics and a rich troubleshooting experience that goes beyond infrastructure-level data to help teams quickly identify and resolve issues. For example, a platform team managing a microservices application on EKS can now detect latency spikes or error rate increases at the service level without any additional setup, accelerating root cause analysis during incidents.

This feature is available in all commercial AWS regions where Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals is available; to get started, you can refer to the Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals documentation and upgrade to version 5.0.0 of the add-on.