Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When you’re operating a web application, the last thing you want to hear is “the site is down." Regardless of the reason, the fact that it is down is enough to cause anyone responsible for an app to break out into a sweat. As soon as you become aware of an issue, a clock starts ticking — literally, in some cases — to get the issue fixed. Minimizing this time between an issue occurring and its resolution is arguably the number one goal for any operations team.

At the turn of the 20th Century, enterprises shut down their clunky generators and started buying electricity from new utilities such as the Edison Illuminating Company. In doing so, they cut costs, simplified operations, and made profound leaps in productivity. The promise of modern cloud computing invites easy comparisons to those first electric utilities: outsource to them, save money and simplify.

Operational resilience is currently a hot topic in Financial Services, largely because of the impact that COVID has had on how customers interact with financial institutions. Almost overnight, the financial services industry had to cope with a large volume of transactions moving to digital channels at the same time as its employees were forced to set up home offices so that they could continue to work remotely.

Our Kibana team has been hard at work implementing and executing on a new Kibana strategic vision to streamline the dashboard creation process and sand down the rough edges of creating visualizations for dashboards. We accomplished our goal and reduced the overall time it takes users to go from a blank slate to a meaningful dashboard that conveys insights about the data.

SREs, developers and DevOps staff for mission-critical modern apps know being notified in real-time when or before critical conditions occur can make a massive difference in end-user digital experiences and in meeting a 99.99% availability objective.

For DevOps teams that want to accelerate release velocity and improve reliability, logs can unlock the insights you need to move faster. But for managers and budget owners, logging can be an unpredictable pain. Trying to estimate logging spend, especially with the adoption of microservices and container-based architecture, seems like an impossible task.

The LogDNA Agent is a powerful way for developers and SREs to aggregate logs from their many applications and services into an easy-to-use web interface. With only 3 kubectl commands, the installation process is quick and simple to complete for any number of connected systems. To help control the logs that are stored and surfaced in the LogDNA web interface, users can set Exclusion Rules, which enables the exclusion of certain queries, hosts, and tags directly from the UI.

In this post, we will discuss some key considerations and strategies to collect and analyze your AWS Lambda logs. This will include 1) what to know about logging Lambda functions, 2) how to ship log data to a centralized logging solution, and 3) how to search and visualize log data on monitoring dashboards.