Good observability is a must-have for modern AWS applications. CloudWatch gives you the tools but leaves you with a lot of work to do. To accelerate this, we created a serverless plugin to quickly build best practice alarms and dashboards.
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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 “
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!
✅ Third-party services offer a better UX ❌ Data needs to be exported from AWS ❌ Uncertainty about future direction of new providers in this space ❌ You might be stuck in dual-mode Using third-parties
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!)
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
How to get started 📣 Create an SNS Topic as the alarm destination 📦 ❯ 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!
Wrapping up 🎁 ★ CloudWatch is very valuable if you configure it right! ★ Automation takes away the pain ★ SLIC Watch gives you this automation ★ You still have control and flexibility 🔬Try it out! 🗣 Give feedback! 🌈 Let’s make it better!