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AWS Bedrock AgentCore and Amazon CloudWatch can help teams see how agents behave in production through metrics, logs, spans, and traces. That visibility helps you detect and diagnose failures; it does not automatically repair them. To make an agent self-healing, build a separate recovery policy that chooses bounded, safe actions and verifies the result.
What AgentCore observability shows—and what it does not do
AWS describes AgentCore Observability as helping teams “trace, debug, and monitor agent performance in production environments.” AgentCore telemetry can be viewed in CloudWatch, including service metrics, logs, spans, and traces. To capture the full telemetry range and custom metrics from agent code, configure instrumentation with the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT). See AWS’s Get started with AgentCore Observability guide.
These signals can expose slow or failed operations, help connect activity across an agent session, and give operators evidence for troubleshooting. They are not, by themselves, a repair mechanism. The AWS observability material describes monitoring and debugging; it does not establish that AgentCore automatically retries, switches models, repairs tools, or restores an agent after failure.
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Choose the setup for your hosting model
First establish where the agent runs. AgentCore Runtime-hosted agents and externally hosted agents have different instrumentation paths and configuration responsibilities. AWS’s Configure AgentCore Observability guide covers the setup distinctions.
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| Deployment | Instrumentation path | Operational responsibility |
|---|---|---|
| AgentCore Runtime-hosted | Configure ADOT and the framework’s OpenTelemetry output according to the current AgentCore guide. The configuration page lists aws-opentelemetry-distro>=0.18.0; verify the current requirement before deployment. |
Confirm the configured telemetry destination, IAM permissions, account and Region, and any encryption requirements. |
| Externally hosted | Use the documented ADOT SDK setup or, for Lambda, the OpenTelemetry layer route. AWS states that the ADOT Collector is unsupported for this agent-observability path. | Own the host-side instrumentation, permissions, telemetry delivery, and the integration of trace context across service boundaries. |
Do not assume two deployments share identical defaults simply because both use AgentCore. Confirm the actual instrumentation and destination in the AWS guide for your hosting model, then check the account and Region where the agent operates.
Enable trace search and find the right telemetry
Turn on CloudWatch Transaction Search
CloudWatch Transaction Search must be enabled before you can search AgentCore spans and traces. AWS’s getting-started guide says spans may take up to ten minutes to become available for search and analysis after enabling Transaction Search; this is an operational estimate, not a guarantee. Consult AWS’s getting-started instructions for the current account setup and console steps.
Use agent, session, and trace views together
CloudWatch’s generative AI observability experience provides agent, session, and trace views. Use a session ID to group related turns, then follow traces across service boundaries to see where a request slowed down or failed. Add useful custom attributes to distinguish fault classes—such as a tool, operation, or environment—without putting secrets or unnecessary personal data into telemetry.
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Confirm where telemetry is delivered
AWS announced that unified AgentCore telemetry delivery places traces, prompts, structured logs, and standard output in a per-agent log group by default for newly created agents from July 20, 2026, in supported AWS commercial Regions. The announcement was published July 23, 2026. For existing agents, AWS documents enabling the unified destination with UNIFIED_TRACES_DESTINATION_ENABLED=true and ADOT version 0.17.1 or later. See the AWS announcement on unified observability.
These destination details are conditional: confirm that your Region is supported and check the current AWS documentation before applying the setting. For new and existing deployments alike, verify the destination in the actual environment rather than assuming telemetry is going to a particular log group.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Design a recovery loop separately from observability
Signals can trigger or inform application-level recovery, but the recovery policy belongs to your agent or orchestration design. A useful loop has three parts: detect a defined failure, choose an allowed response, and verify that the agent’s subsequent behavior is acceptable.
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1Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches2Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems3Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute- Define eligible failures. Decide which errors warrant recovery, such as a transient dependency failure, and which require stopping or escalating. Avoid treating every error as transient.
- Set strict budgets. Bound retries, elapsed time, and cost. Use backoff where appropriate, and ensure retries do not multiply across layers into an uncontrolled request storm.
- Protect side effects. Before retrying operations that change external state, determine whether they are idempotent or use an idempotency mechanism. A repeated payment, message, or write is not a safe recovery.
- Choose explicit fallbacks. Define when a fallback tool or response is permitted, what capability or quality it loses, and when the system must stop rather than provide an unreliable result.
- Escalate when recovery is unsafe or exhausted. Route unresolved cases to an operator or return a clear failure instead of looping indefinitely.
- Verify the outcome. Examine the post-recovery trace and relevant application state to confirm that the intended task completed correctly—not merely that a retry returned without an error.
These are engineering safeguards for a self-healing system, not built-in AgentCore observability features. Telemetry supports the decision and lets you audit what happened; application logic determines whether and how recovery occurs.
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Operational checklist
- Record whether the agent is Runtime-hosted or externally hosted, and identify its AWS account and Region.
- Configure the applicable ADOT and framework OpenTelemetry path, checking current version requirements.
- Enable CloudWatch Transaction Search and allow for spans to become searchable.
- Confirm the destination log group and review IAM access and encryption boundaries.
- Propagate session identifiers and trace context; add fault-isolating attributes without exposing sensitive data.
- Set alarms on operational metrics and define who responds to them.
- Keep retry, fallback, idempotency, budget, escalation, and post-recovery verification rules in the application or orchestration layer.
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