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Start by finding out what business outcome is affected, which workload and AWS accounts are in scope, when the problem began, and who can authorize a change. Check immediately for an active security incident, data exposure, or material outage. Then gather evidence and prioritize the issue before making changes; do not alter an unknown system until you have identified its owner and decision authority.
What should you establish before troubleshooting?
First turn a broad request to “find and fix problems” into a specific, bounded issue. Ask the requester and workload owner:
- Which application, service, or business process is affected, and who owns it?
- What symptoms are users seeing, when did they begin, and how many users or business operations are affected?
- Which AWS accounts, Regions, and environments might be involved?
- Did a deployment, configuration change, or other operational event occur shortly before the issue?
- What is the business consequence, and how urgent is it?
- Who can approve remediation, and what escalation path applies?
Escalate promptly if there is an active security incident, suspected data exposure, or a material availability problem. Treat those as urgent response situations, not routine troubleshooting. AWS guidance recommends prioritizing events by business and customer impact and assigning ownership and an escalation path (AWS Well-Architected Framework: Operate).
How do you build an evidence-based picture?
Use the symptom and timeline to decide what evidence to examine. Compare relevant metrics, logs, and traces with the workload’s established baselines, and correlate them with recent changes. A single alarm or log entry rarely establishes a root cause by itself. AWS identifies Amazon CloudWatch, AWS X-Ray, AWS CloudTrail, and VPC Flow Logs as sources that can provide workload insight and help with root-cause analysis (AWS operational guidance).
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Check account and security activity
Review CloudTrail for relevant AWS API activity and service logs for the affected workload. AWS Config history and rules can help show resource configuration changes or evaluation results. GuardDuty findings can surface suspicious activity, while Security Hub CSPM can aggregate and prioritize findings. These tools provide signals to investigate; their presence, or lack of findings, is not proof that an account is safe or compliant.
Follow the issue into the network and workload
For connectivity or traffic questions, consider VPC Flow Logs and Route 53 Resolver query logs. Add the logs that match the architecture and symptoms, such as load balancer, web application firewall, EKS, EC2 operating system or application, and RDS logs. Which evidence is available depends on the services in use and what logging was configured before the issue; an absent log is not evidence that an event did not occur. AWS’s logging guidance describes these sources and the need to configure service and application logging (Configure service and application logging).
Know the limits of historical evidence
AWS documentation accessed in October 2026 states that CloudTrail Event history provides 90 days of management-event history by default. A trail and storage destination are needed for longer retention and data-event visibility; AWS says CloudTrail Lake can retain logs for up to seven years. These limits and options are product guidance, so confirm current AWS documentation when planning an investigation or retention design (AWS logging guidance).
How should you choose a fix?
Once the evidence narrows the likely cause, compare candidate responses before changing the environment. The most appropriate action depends on customer impact, evidence quality, risk, scope, reversibility, and authority—not on which change is easiest to make.
- Impact and urgency: prioritize customer and business consequences.
- Evidence: favor a response supported by several relevant signals over one based on an isolated alarm.
- Risk and scope: assess security and reliability risks, affected accounts, Regions, and workloads, and the potential blast radius.
- Reversibility and approval: identify a rollback or recovery path and obtain authorization from the person responsible for the workload.
- Operational cost: consider whether the investigation or proposed monitoring creates storage and query costs, and whether the retention period matches a real need.
For a well-understood event, AWS recommends established runbooks; for an uncertain issue, use a playbook to guide investigation and resolution. Assign an owner, follow the applicable escalation route, and verify that the change restored the intended business outcome (AWS Well-Architected Framework: Operate).
How should you preserve evidence and prevent a repeat?
Keep relevant logs available to the people conducting the investigation, with access controls and a retention policy suited to investigation, business, and compliance needs. AWS says organizations commonly keep three months to one year of logs readily queryable, with retention up to seven years depending on those requirements. These are AWS guidance figures, not universal legal requirements; a company’s actual obligations depend on its circumstances (AWS logging guidance).
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After the issue is understood, update the relevant runbook or investigation playbook, alerting, and operational baselines. Avoid both deleting useful evidence too soon and retaining everything indefinitely: choose what to keep and for how long based on its intended use.
How can you assess the broader environment?
If the request is broader than one incident, use the six AWS Well-Architected Framework pillars as assessment dimensions: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability. They help organize questions about the environment, but they do not prescribe the same fix for every company. AWS frames architecture decisions as trade-offs that depend on business context (AWS Well-Architected Framework definitions).
Keep the assessment grounded in the workload’s goals, evidence, and ownership. AWS documentation is vendor guidance; it cannot establish the root cause or the right change for a particular company without details about its architecture, configuration, and incident.
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