The New Serverless APM for AWS Lambda

January 23 2019
 

AppDynamics’ new Serverless APM for AWS Lambda helps our customers running serverless microservice workloads gain visibility and insight into the performance and impact of their applications.


To control costs and reduce the burden of infrastructure management in the cloud, more companies are using services like AWS Lambda to deploy serverless functions. Due to the unpredictable nature of end-user demand in today’s digital-first world, serverless functions that can be spun up as needed can also help resolve unplanned scaling issues.

But that’s not to say these serverless workloads don’t impact the overall performance of your application environment. In fact, since these workloads are transient in nature, they represent a real challenge for teams who need to correlate an issue across their application environment, or see the impact that serverless applications are having on end users—or even on the business itself.

How AppDynamics Helps

Today, we’re announcing a new family of application agents that help our customers who use serverless microservices gain more visibility and insight into the performance of their application and its impact on the broader ecosystem.

In the same way that we collect and baseline metrics and events for traditional applications, we can now help serverless users gain deep insight into response times, throughput and exception rates in applications using services built in any mixture of serverless and conventional runtimes. Thus bringing our industry-leading ability to visualize end-user and business impact into the serverless realm, helping teams prioritize issue-resolution efforts and optimize the performance of these ephemeral workloads.

What We Do

The first iteration of AppDynamics’ Serverless Agent family targets Java microservices running in AWS Lambda, and is available as a beta program for qualified customers. Here’s how it works:

The Serverless APM for AWS Lambda allows our customers to instrument their lambda code at entry (when it is invoked from an external request source), and exit (when it invokes some external downstream service), and to ingest incoming or populate outgoing correlation headers. Also, our streamlined approach to collecting metrics and events from serverless functions means you never have to worry about missing an important data point that may have gone unnoticed, or slowing down your otherwise healthy serverless functions.

You can find out more and sign up for AppDynamics’ AWS Lambda beta program on our community site.

Aaron Newcomb
Aaron Newcomb is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at AppDynamics with over 20 years of IT industry experience. He is a published author and speaks about technology regularly at conferences and on podcasts like TWiT.tv.

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