A significant AWS outage on October 19-20, 2025, caused by a DNS failure in the DynamoDB API, led to widespread disruptions across over 140 AWS services, affecting major platforms and clients. The incident highlights the importance of observability in quickly detecting and resolving such failures, emphasizing that organizations using Full-Stack Observability can mitigate financial losses and improve response times during outages. Effective monitoring and real-time visibility into service impacts are crucial for managing risks in cloud environments.

AWS Lambda requires careful consideration for observability due to its serverless nature, which complicates monitoring and debugging. This guide explores the challenges of implementing OpenTelemetry with AWS Lambda, offers insights into instrumentation methods like AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) and custom SDKs, and discusses deployment options for telemetry data collection, all while emphasizing the importance of understanding the Lambda execution lifecycle.