No More Black Boxes: Observable Local AWS Dev with LocalStack App Inspector

You've been there: Lambda triggers, SQS messages fly, Step Functions execute, and somewhere in the middle, something breaks. You have no idea what triggered what, what payload was passed, or where it all went wrong.

That's the black box problem of AWS development.

Once your architecture grows beyond a single service, visibility disappears fast. You're left stitching together scattered logs and redeploying just to see what's going on.

App Inspector is LocalStack's built-in observability layer that opens up that black box. It gives you a real-time, unified view of every service interaction happening inside your local cloud: what triggered what, with what payload, in what order.

In this talk, we'll walk through what App Inspector is, how it fits into your LocalStack workflow, and how to use it to catch bugs locally before they ever reach staging or production.

Related Talks

Smarter Serverless Dev with LocalStack VS Code Toolkit & Lambda Debugging

In this hands-on session, you’ll learn how to level up your serverless development by integrating the AWS Toolkit for VS Code with LocalStack — enabling faster Lambda development, debugging, and testing without needing a live AWS account. 👨‍💻 Featuring: Joel Scheuner, Senior Software Engineer at LocalStack, will show you how to configure the AWS Toolkit for VS Code to connect with LocalStack, deploy and test Lambda functions locally with full AWS emulation, set breakpoints and debug functions right from your IDE, and iterate quickly on code changes with minimal setup overhead. You’ll also hear from an AWS engineer sharing real-world insights and best practices for modern serverless workflows. Whether you’re new to serverless or already deep in AWS development, this session will help you code with confidence and streamline your Lambda workflow from start to finish — all from your laptop.

Learn More
Learn More
Testing CloudWatch metric alarms with LocalStack

LocalStack is a cloud service emulator designed for local development and testing of cloud applications. With LocalStack, you can test AWS CloudWatch metric alarms, to get notified on infrastructure failures — all on your local machine! In this video, you will learn how you can use a CloudWatch metric alarm to get notified automatically when your Lambda function invocations fail. You will also set up an email notification using the Simple Email Service (SES) and our Mailhog extension.

Learn More
Learn More
Testing Cloud Apps Shouldn't Be This Hard

Testing in the cloud = slow builds, fragile staging, surprise bills. Let’s talk about how developers are flipping the script and using local cloud environments to test smarter, faster, and cheaper without breaking production. Bonus: You’ll learn how LocalStack lets you simulate AWS on your machine. Game changer.

Learn More
Learn More

Launch yourself in the world of local cloud development

Try for free
Try for free
Talk to Sales
Talk to Sales