AWS Observability Made Simple
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1. The document discusses observability in AWS and introduces a tool called SLIC Watch that automates the configuration of CloudWatch alarms and dashboards for serverless applications. 2. SLIC Watch generates CloudFormation templates that set up application-specific dashboards and alarms using metrics from services like Lambda, DynamoDB, and API Gateway to help operators more quickly identify issues. 3. The document provides an example of how SLIC Watch could help diagnose issues like DynamoDB throttling and Lambda timeouts by automating the creation of relevant metrics and alarms without requiring manual configuration of CloudWatch.
![CloudFormation for CloudWatch Alarms 😬
"Type": "AWS::CloudWatch::Alarm",
"Properties": {
"ActionsEnabled": true,
"AlarmActions": [
"arn:aws:sns:eu-west-1:665863320777:FTSLICAlarms"
],
"AlarmName": "LambdaThrottles_serverless-test-project-dev-hello",
"AlarmDescription": "Throttles % for serverless-test-project-dev-hello ..",
"EvaluationPeriods": 1,
"ComparisonOperator": "GreaterThanThreshold",
"Threshold": 0,
"TreatMissingData": "notBreaching",
"Metrics": [
{
"Id": "throttles_pc",
"Expression": "(throttles / throttles + invocations) * 100",
"Label": "% Throttles",
"ReturnData": true
},
{
"Id": "throttles",
"MetricStat": {
"Metric": {
"Namespace": "AWS/Lambda",
"MetricName": "Throttles",
"Dimensions": [
{
"Name": "FunctionName",
"Value": "serverless-test-project-dev-hello"
}
]
},
"Period": 60,
"Stat": "Sum"
},
"ReturnData": false
},
{
"Id": "invocations",
"MetricStat": {
"Metric": {
"Namespace": "AWS/Lambda",
"MetricName": "Invocations",](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/awsobservabilitymadesimplewithserverless-fourtheoerm-211112092127/85/AWS-Observability-Made-Simple-29-320.jpg)
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AWS Observability Made Simple
- 1. AWS Observability made simple Eóin Shanaghy - Luciano Mammino AWS Community Day - November 11th 2021 fth.link/o11y-simple
- 2. Hi! I’m Eoin 🙂 CTO aiasaservicebook.com @eoins eoins ✉ Get in touch
- 3. 👋 Hello, I am Luciano Senior architect nodejsdesignpatterns.com Let’s connect: 🌎 loige.co 🐦 @loige 🎥 loige 🧳 lucianomammino
- 4. We are business focused technologists that deliver. Accelerated Serverless | AI as a Service | Platform Modernisation We are hiring! Let’s have a chat 🙂
- 5. Check out our new Podcast! awsbites.com
- 7. Observability in the cloud a measure of how well internal states of a system can be inferred from knowledge of its external outputs 🪵 🔍 📈 🚨 Structured Logs Tracing Metrics Alarms “
- 8. A typical case study ⚡ Serverless app ● Distributed system (100s of components) 🔌 HTTP APIs using ● Lambda ● DynamoDB ● API Gateway ● Cognito 🧱 Multiple services / stacks 🏁 Using SLIC Starter (fth.link/slic) 173 resources!
- 9. A typical case study ⚽ The goal: know about problems before users do How? 📝 Structured Logs 📐 Metrics 🔔 Alarms 📊 Dashboards 🗺 Traces (X-Ray)
- 10. Can we test our observability? We run a stress test ○ Simulate traffic using the integration test ○ Run the test a number of times in parallel (in a loop) ○ Exercises all the APIs with typical use cases (login, CRUD operations, etc.) 🚨 After 10-15 minutes, we started to get alarms...
- 11. 🚨 Alerts flow!
- 12. Making sense of alerts
- 13. Initial Hypothesis 🛑 We got throttled (DynamoDB write throttle events) ↪ 🔁 causing AWS SDK retries (in the Lambda function) ↪ ⏱ causing Lambda timeouts ↪ 👎 causing API Gateway 502 🧪 How do we validate this? 1. Check the timeout cause ➡ Lambda metrics/logs 2. Check the Lambda error cause ➡ Lambda logs 3. Identify the source of 5xx errors in API Gateway ➡ X-Ray 4. Check the DynamoDB metrics ➡ Dashboards
- 15. Checking timeouts ● Check lambda timeouts ○ Duration metrics (aggregated data) ○ Logs (individual requests) ● Logs Insights give us duration for each individual request. We can use this to isolate the logs for just that request. ● We use stats to see how many executions are affected.
- 17. Tracing errors
- 18. HTTP 502
- 21. Conclusions 🌡 Symptom 🐞 Problem Resolution 1 DynamoDB throttles Table with low provisioned WCUs (write capacity) Switch table to PAY_PER_REQUEST Add throttling in API Gateway to limit potential cost impact 2 API 502 Errors Lambda Timeouts Throttles caused DynamoDB retries with exponential backoff - up to 50 seconds of retry Change maxRetries to 3 (350ms max retry) 3 API 500 Errors Attempt to update a missing record - problem with integration test! Fix the integration test to ensure deletion occurs after other actions complete. Also improved the API design
- 22. Before and after
- 23. What we have learned so far ● We were able to identify, understand and fix these errors quite quickly ● We didn’t have to change the code to do that ● Nor did we run it locally with a debugger ● All of this was possible because we configured observability tools in AWS in advance
- 24. AWS native o11y = CloudWatch Cloudwatch gives you: ➔ Logs with Insights ➔ Metrics ➔ Dashboards ➔ Alarms ➔ Canaries ➔ Distributed tracing (with X-Ray)
- 25. Alternatives outside AWS Established New entrants Roll your own (only for the brave)
- 26. CloudWatch out of the box 😍 A toolkit you can use to build observability 🤩 Metrics are automatically generated for all services! 😟 Lots of dashboards, but by service and not by application! 😢 Zero alarms out of the box!
- 27. Getting the best out of Cloudwatch Cloudwatch can be your friend if you... 📚 Research and understand available metrics 📐 Decide thresholds 📊 Write IaC for application dashboards ⏰ Write IaC for service metric alarms ⏪ Update every time your application changes 📋 Copy and paste for each stack in your application (a.k.a. A LOT OF WORK!)
- 28. Best practices 😇 AWS Well Architected Framework 🏛 5 Pillars ⚙ Operational excellence pillar covers observability 🧐 Serverless lens applies these pillars 👍 Good guidance on metrics to observe 👎 More reading and research + you still have to pick thresholds
- 29. CloudFormation for CloudWatch Alarms 😬 "Type": "AWS::CloudWatch::Alarm", "Properties": { "ActionsEnabled": true, "AlarmActions": [ "arn:aws:sns:eu-west-1:665863320777:FTSLICAlarms" ], "AlarmName": "LambdaThrottles_serverless-test-project-dev-hello", "AlarmDescription": "Throttles % for serverless-test-project-dev-hello ..", "EvaluationPeriods": 1, "ComparisonOperator": "GreaterThanThreshold", "Threshold": 0, "TreatMissingData": "notBreaching", "Metrics": [ { "Id": "throttles_pc", "Expression": "(throttles / throttles + invocations) * 100", "Label": "% Throttles", "ReturnData": true }, { "Id": "throttles", "MetricStat": { "Metric": { "Namespace": "AWS/Lambda", "MetricName": "Throttles", "Dimensions": [ { "Name": "FunctionName", "Value": "serverless-test-project-dev-hello" } ] }, "Period": 60, "Stat": "Sum" }, "ReturnData": false }, { "Id": "invocations", "MetricStat": { "Metric": { "Namespace": "AWS/Lambda", "MetricName": "Invocations",
- 30. Can we automate this? Magically generated alarms and dashboards for each application!
- 32. How SLIC Watch works 🛠 Your app serverless.yml sls deploy CloudFormation stack very-big.json SLIC Watch 👀 🛠 CloudFormation stack ++ even-bigger.json Deploy ☁ 📊📈
- 34. After SLIC Watch
- 35. After SLIC Watch
- 36. After SLIC Watch
- 37. After SLIC Watch
- 38. After SLIC Watch Check out SLIC Slack
- 39. Configuration 🎀 SLIC Watch comes with sane defaults 📝 You can configure what you don’t like 🔌 Or disable specific dashboards or alarms
- 40. How to get started 📣 Create an SNS Topic as the alarm destination (optional) 📦 ❯ npm install serverless-slic-watch-plugin --save-dev ✍ Update serverless.yml ⚙ Configure (optional) 🚢 ❯ sls deploy plugins: - serverless-slic-watch-plugin 💡 Check out the complete example project in the repo!
- 41. Wrapping up 🎁 ★ If your services are failing you definitely want to know about it! ★ Observability can save you from hundreds of hours of blind debugging! ★ CloudWatch is the go to tool in AWS but you have to configure it! ★ Automation can take most of the configuration pain away ★ SLIC Watch can give you this automation ★ You still have control and flexibility 🔬Try it out! 🗣 Give feedback! 🌈 Let’s make it better! fth.link/slic-watch
- 42. Thank you! fth.link/o11y-simple Cover picture by Markus Spiske on Unsplash