Debugging on AWS is Broken
Stop hunting through CloudWatch log groups. There's a better way to debug errors using Forte.
Debugging on AWS is Broken
It's 3 AM and your API is returning 500s. The error is in the logs somewhere. All you have to do is find it.
How hard could that be?
The CloudWatch Routine
If you've debugged a production issue on AWS, you know the routine:
Step 1: Open CloudWatch. Face the wall of log groups.
/aws/lambda/api-gateway-handler/aws/lambda/checkout-processor/aws/apigateway/production/ecs/my-service- ...20 more
Step 2: Pick the log group you think is right.
Step 3: Write a Logs Insights query from memory:
fields @timestamp, @message
| filter @message like /ERROR/
| sort @timestamp desc
| limit 100Step 4: Find nothing, because the error is in a different log group. Start over.
Step 5: Correlate timestamps between the API Gateway access logs and your application logs by hand. Was it 03:45:23.389Z or 03:45:23.390Z? UTC or local?
Step 6: Give up and add Sentry or another third-party observability tool.
The Vendor Tax
The standard conclusion at this point is "CloudWatch is unusable, let's add Sentry" — or Datadog, or PostHog. Now you're:
- Paying a monthly bill for error tracking
- Instrumenting every service with an SDK
- Still matching timestamps by hand when you need the full context around an error
- Managing another vendor
And CloudWatch doesn't stop billing you because you stopped reading it. You pay to ingest and store every log line either way — many teams find CloudWatch Logs is one of the largest line items on their AWS bill, ahead of the compute that actually serves their product. So you end up paying twice for the same logs: once to store them where you can't read them, and again for the tool that makes them readable.
Even if you skip the vendor and stay in CloudWatch, every investigation is query authoring: a Logs Insights query per hypothesis, regex to isolate the error, and the standing worry that the log group you didn't check had the answer. It's 2026, and debugging still feels like grepping through /var/log on a server you SSH'd into.
There's a Better Way
Here's what debugging should look like:
Step 1: See every request in one table. Step 2: Click the one that failed. Step 3: Read its logs.
No log groups, no query language, no timestamp archaeology.
Click the failing request (500 error) below to see its logs. This is the actual Forte interface.
| Timestamp | Method | Path | Status | Latency (ms) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 12, 03:45:18 | GET | /api/users | 200 | 45.20 |
| Feb 12, 03:45:19 | POST | /api/orders | 201 | 89.50 |
| Feb 12, 03:45:20 | GET | /api/products/123 | 200 | 32.10 |
| Feb 12, 03:45:23 | POST | /api/checkout | 500 | 1250.80 |
| Feb 12, 03:45:25 | GET | /api/cart | 200 | 28.30 |
| Feb 12, 03:45:27 | POST | /api/webhooks/stripe | 422 | 156.20 |
| Feb 12, 03:45:28 | GET | /health | 200 | 12.50 |
| Feb 12, 03:45:30 | GET | /api/orders | 200 | 51.70 |
Notice what happened: the 500 was visible immediately, and clicking it showed the exact log lines from that request, already correlated. The error is right there: Database connection timeout.
Why This Works
Forte records every HTTP request to your API and links it to the log lines your application wrote while handling it. Click a request and you see:
- The request and response, headers and body
- Every log line from that request's lifecycle
- Latency broken down by stage
- The authenticated user it belonged to
The table filters by method, path, status code, and latency, so "show me the failed checkouts from the last hour" is a filter, not a query. There's no magic in any of this — CloudWatch has the same data. It just never assembles it for you.
Where Sentry, Datadog, and PostHog Fit
These are good tools. Error aggregation across releases, full APM with distributed tracing, product analytics — if you're running thirty services with an SRE team, you'll probably want one of them, and Forte doesn't replace them for that.
But the question you actually have at 3 AM is which request broke, and what did it log? For that, they're heavy: an SDK in every service, a second copy of your logs, a pricing curve that follows your traffic, and a dashboard built for questions you aren't asking. You're adopting a vendor to compensate for a missing default.
Forte ships that default, included with hosting. For the common loop — find the failing request, read its logs, fix the bug — it's often 95% faster than the CloudWatch routine: a half-hour log hunt becomes a sixty-second filter. The fix was never the hard part. Finding it was.
Stop Hunting
If you're tired of tedious and costly CloudWatch debugging, deploy a service on Forte. Request-level debugging is included, with nothing to instrument and no separate bill — and it comes with the rest of the platform: containerized builds straight from GitHub, automatic deploys on every push, user sign-in, and Stripe-powered payments.
Your infrastructure should show you what broke, not make you hunt for it.