Answer
The AWS CloudWatch receiver uses the timestamp provided by CloudWatch as the event timestamp, which often has lower precision than the actual log entries in your CI/CD pipeline. This can cause logs from the same CloudWatch log stream to appear out of order, especially when multiple log lines share the same CloudWatch timestamp.
The receiver does not automatically parse or extract timestamps from within the log message content itself. For example, if your CodeBuild logs contain timestamps like [Container] 2026/01/05 17:52:19.313300, these more precise timestamps are not used for ordering.
To resolve this issue and preserve correct log ordering:
- Use Pipelines to parse and extract the timestamp from your log payload
- Configure the pipeline to set the extracted timestamp as the correct log timestamp
- This will allow SigNoz to use the more precise timestamp embedded in your log messages for proper ordering
This behavior is expected when using the AWS CloudWatch receiver, as it relies on CloudWatch's event timestamps rather than parsing log content. The limitation comes from how the OpenTelemetry AWS CloudWatch receiver processes the data from the CloudWatch API.
Answer
The AWS CloudWatch receiver uses the timestamp provided by CloudWatch as the event timestamp, which often has lower precision than the actual log entries in your CI/CD pipeline. This can cause logs from the same CloudWatch log stream to appear out of order, especially when multiple log lines share the same CloudWatch timestamp.
The receiver does not automatically parse or extract timestamps from within the log message content itself. For example, if your CodeBuild logs contain timestamps like
[Container] 2026/01/05 17:52:19.313300, these more precise timestamps are not used for ordering.To resolve this issue and preserve correct log ordering:
This behavior is expected when using the AWS CloudWatch receiver, as it relies on CloudWatch's event timestamps rather than parsing log content. The limitation comes from how the OpenTelemetry AWS CloudWatch receiver processes the data from the CloudWatch API.