Are you spending money on AWS without knowing why? In this episode of The Keys to AWS Optimization, we explore how observability is the missing link between your cloud infrastructure and your FinOps practice. Understanding how your services are actually being used — not just what they cost — is what separates reactive cloud teams from optimized ones. We cover: What observability is and why every cloud team should care about it How observability connects to FinOps — using data to see how services are being used and where spend is hiding Amazon CloudWatch — your starting point for AWS observability EC2 monitoring — metrics, the CloudWatch Agent, and infrastructure traces Database and Container Insights — specialized tools for deeper visibility into your data and container workloads Synthetic monitoring (Canaries) and APM — understanding your users and application performance AI-powered investigations — how CloudWatch Investigations and the DevOps Agent use AI to detect patterns when al...