Observability of a system is of paramount importance for operational performance measurements, resource optimization, security, and regulatory compliance. Amazon CloudWatch, and observability service, is extremely useful for monitoring individual components, applications, and system performance along with enabling automatic autoscaling. Amazon CloudTrail helps track and log API activities. In this whitepaper, we share our learnings and recommendations for using Amazon CloudWatch and CloudTrail for frequently occurring scenarios. More specifically, we discuss six reference architectural patterns that use these two services and implement some of the best practices related to observability in AWS. We also provide sample code that can be used as a reference code for live projects. Read this whitepaper for readymade guidelines and insights on keeping your applications running smoothly.