One of your worst nightmares (or is it already a reality these days?)
In the middle of the night, an alert goes off and you receive a text. A threshold was crossed by a metric. Half-awake, you ask yourself, "Is this an alert that needs to be adjusted, or is there actually a problem? When were our alert thresholds last changed by someone? Perhaps a service upstream or downstream is to blame? You pull yourself out of bed, open your laptop, and begin pouring over dashboards for more information because this is an important application. While you sift through a mountain of data in search of hints, you are conscious that time is running out even though you are not yet persuaded there is a serious issue.
Healthy Applications are vital to your customers.
Let us say a blockbuster movie is streaming this Friday on your application and, your customer expects it to just play without any latency or disturbance. For that, maybe your on-call engineers are battling numerous issues with application monitoring: too many alerts, too many dashboards to scroll through, and too much configuration and maintenance. A full stack monitoring solution that helps your streaming teams identify and fix issues fast is essential—seconds matter! Meanwhile, your CFO is pushing you to build a system that empowers a small group to operate a large fleet of operations.
IT Monitoring: Embracing Multi-cloud, DevOps and SRE.
The rise of site reliability engineering continues to expand the focus of monitoring and observability tools to include development as well as IT operations. Visualization of monitoring data continues to be a challenge for organizations, with multiple tools and dashboards used throughout the business. Organizations continue to struggle with the increasing cost of monitoring and observability solutions, and many are looking to open-source tools, or open-source derived products to augment vendor solutions or as alternatives. What they need is more than just detection of disruptions. They need to know how best to improve at the same.
For Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) leaders focusing on infrastructure, operations, and cloud management, consider the following:
- Shift “left” IT operations tools into the CI/CD pipeline so that they run alongside development, enabling monitoring and observability throughout the lifecycle.
- Have a unified platform that is powered by various reporting or visualization tools to let every organizational layer build their dashboards specific to each job role.
- Enhance monitoring mechanisms and incorporate advanced resource management tools that maximize throughput and quality under defined limits.
That is why we built Managed Observability Monitoring Solution for AWS workloads.
Managed full-stack observability for AWS workloads is a comprehensive service dedicated to delivering holistic monitoring and observability solutions for applications and infrastructures running on the AWS platform. This service encompasses AWS-native, Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability tools, and open-source solutions, equipping you with the capability to comprehend the real-time status of your entire technology stack.
AWS observability empowers you to gather, correlate, consolidate, and analyze telemetry data from your network, infrastructure, and cloud, hybrid, or on-premises applications. This comprehensive approach enables you to gain profound insights into your system's behavior, performance, and overall health that facilitate quicker detection, investigation, and resolution of issues. When combined with artificial intelligence and machine learning, they enable proactive response, prediction, and prevention of problems.
Below are some key aspects of Managed Observability Monitoring for AWS workloads:
- Data Collection: Data collection from application logs, metrics, traces and events within your AWS environment. Such information is obtained from different AWS services, including CloudWatch, CloudTrail, as well as other third-party tools/services.
- Data Aggregation and Storage: This data is usually collected and stored at a place and is made usable for analysis and visualization purposes. Typical storage options for observability data are Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, and dedicated observability databases.
- Data Analysis and Visualization: Observability administered via Cloud4C SHOPTM platform is supported by leaders in this space for analyzing and presenting the results of collected data. These include dashboards, charts, graphs, and alerts that will ensure you have an idea about how your AWS workloads perform and behave.
- Alerting and Notification: Alerts are raised based on preset threshold values or abnormalities. Notification by e-mail, SMS, or integration with incident management. No single algorithm can account for the wide variety of signals we use. So, instead, we employ a mix of algorithms including statistical, rule based, and machine learning. Alert fatigue is reduced by a large extent as SHOPTM platform (an AI/ML enabled Self Healing Operations Platform) ensures that it cuts clutter, and the system learns over time. On-call engineers and leaders need to act only when it is absolutely necessary. Over time, you shouldn’t have to constantly tune the configuration.
- Traceability and Troubleshooting: It is essential that you follow transactions or requests to different AWS services and elements. It is useful for problem-solving and detecting poor performers.
- Security and Compliance: The managed service also ensures the security and compliance of your AWS workloads by monitoring for suspicious activities and violations of best practices.
- Scalability: The service should be able to scale with your AWS workloads. As your workload grows or shrinks, the monitoring service should adapt accordingly.
- Cost Monitoring: Many services provide cost analysis and optimization features to help you manage your AWS spending effectively.
We work with market leaders such as Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, Splunk, AWS CloudWatch, and various open-source solutions like Prometheus and Grafana. Observability Monitoring services from Cloud4C, an Advanced Tier Services Partner for AWS with 7+ competencies, can help you gain deeper insights into the performance, reliability, and security of your AWS applications and infrastructure, enabling you to make informed decisions and quickly address any issues that may arise.
We’re constantly exploring new tools and algorithms to improve the accuracy of our alerts. We’ll write more about that in a future Cloud4C Insights Blog post. We’re also evaluating improvements to our application health model. Stay tuned!
Leave a comment on how you would envision a perfect technology landscape monitoring platform/service. We’d love to hear from you!
