CloudWatch Application Signals now supports Dynamic Instrumentation

AWS announces Dynamic Instrumentation for Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals, enabling developers to capture runtime state from live applications without requiring restarts or redeployments. This allows debugging production issues by inspecting variable values, method arguments, return values, and stack traces at specific code locations. Dynamic Instrumentation eliminates the need to add logging statements, redeploy, and wait to reproduce a problem, making it practical to investigate issues difficult to replicate locally. Customers start by instrumenting their application with the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) SDKs, then configure which code locations to monitor using the CloudWatch Application Signals MCP server or manually via the AWS CLI and SDK. When execution reaches an instrumented location, the agent captures a snapshot containing the runtime context and delivers it to CloudWatch Logs, correlated with the active trace. Customers can tune how much data to capture, including which arguments and local variables to collect. Dynamic Instrumentation is available in all commercial AWS regions, supporting Java, Python, and JavaScript/TypeScript. The feature is disabled by default in the ADOT SDKs and must be enabled via a flag. For more information, see Debug applications with Dynamic Instrumentation in the Amazon CloudWatch User Guide. Dynamic instrumentation data is captured as logs, with standard CloudWatch Logs ingestion and storage rates applying.