Serverless computing is flourishing, and for good reason. Serverless promises to make cloud operating models more efficient by expanding the cloud’s pay-as-you-go economics with consumption-based billing. At AppDynamics, we’re bringing our knowledge and expertise to help you maximize your Amazon Web Services (AWS) investments using our comprehensive observability platform. Case in point: AppDynamics Serverless APM is now available to our SaaS customers through AWS Marketplace.
AWS Lambda, Amazon’s serverless compute offering, has seen explosive growth since its launch in 2014. The increase in Lambda adoption has brought a surge in demand for tools that measure the application code running inside serverless environments.
What are the Benefits of Our CloudWatch Integration?
With our new CloudWatch Integration for Elastic Load Balancer, AppDynamics users can view Amazon-hosted entities and data in several AppD products by connecting their Amazon accounts to AppDynamics. We use Amazon’s CloudWatch API to obtain metrics in near real-time from AWS resources and applications. This combination of AppDynamics and AWS cloud-native monitoring helps you identify and diagnose a variety of issues from a single Controller.
The AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform ingests metrics from CloudWatch and utilizes that data to perform problem analysis. If performance issues in your application are impacted by AWS services—such as a slow RDS database or EC2 instance—AppDynamics can identify the external cause. This enables you to see all of your important CloudWatch metrics directly in the AppDynamics interface, and AppDynamics’ AI and ML-powered Cognition Engine will utilize these metrics when detecting anomalies and analyzing root cause.
AppDynamics allows you to consolidate events and metrics for AWS technologies under a single roof. We’re also able to correlate these events and metrics from different sources, allowing you to generate more comprehensive dashboards. By combining data from Amazon CloudWatch with the AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform, your organization can gain full visibility into its cloud infrastructure running on AWS.
For more information on our CloudWatch ELB Monitoring Extension, view our AppDynamics documentation on AWS Monitoring Extensions.
Benefits of Serverless APM
Serverless-based innovations offer greater flexibility and scalability, along with faster release of software deployments. Developers don’t need to stress over purchasing, provisioning and managing backend servers. And for organizations with annual budget cycles, the fact that bills for serverless compute are usually an order of magnitude lower than equivalent EC2 bills—for the same service level—mitigates the perceived risk of cost unpredictability.
We see this trend among our enterprise customers. AWS Lambda adoption is bringing innovations such as front-ending core systems with new Lambda-based open APIs (for example, open banking APIs) and microservices that wrap online store apps to incrementally modernize the user experience.
These developments present clear imperatives for a Lambda-based APM-monitoring product. We now provide comprehensive performance monitoring of both AWS Lambda functions and your other applications. Our flow map automatically maps the relationship between application services to provide deeper visibility into how serverless applications are impacting your business performance and application performance.
AppDynamics Serverless Application Performance Monitoring (Serverless APM) for AWS Lambda gives you visibility into the performance of your application’s components that run as functions on serverless compute environments. Serverless APM provides an end-to-end view of applications through business transaction correlation. It also correlates business transactions between AWS Lambda functions and components instrumented with AppDynamics app agents, along with devices instrumented with AppDynamics End User Monitoring (EUM) agents.
Additionally, Serverless APM correlates business transactions through serverless functions, such an AWS Lambda function that invokes another function. For an existing user of AppDynamics, adding both Node.js and Java AWS Lambda functions to your application flow maps now takes only a few easy steps:
- Subscribe to the Lambda monitoring service in AWS Marketplace.
- Set up your serverless APM environment.
- Instrument the Lambda code and any outbound calls it makes using the AppDynamics tracer.
- Run load through your system.
- View the flow map in your Controller. In the example flow map below, the traffic to the AWS Lambda system originates from an upstream Java application. You don’t see the node counts in the serverless tiers because the serverless runtime manages a set of ephemeral nodes on your behalf.
- Enjoy your familiar AppDynamics experience, spanning conventional and serverless components based on your architecture.
For more information, view our AppDynamics documentation on Serverless APM for AWS Lambda.
For details on how to instrument your Node.js function, see our AppDynamics documentation on Node.js Serverless Tracer.
