Worried about problems or performance issues in your user experience? Discover the metrics that are critical when monitoring your serverless applications. A serverless expert will take you through the evolution of application architectures and their monitoring challenges. Participants will learn how to better monitor and troubleshoot issues and better understand how the events in their serverless applications are connected. This session is helpful for people who have a basic understanding of serverless environments as well as seasoned serverless developers. The fine folks will get a short and accurate review of the evolution that happened regarding infrastructure and the way we develop software; I will guide and enlight them on the acute troubleshooting and operations problems that they experience every day while showing them how it SHOULD be. In addition, I will present some available solutions to overcome these issues.

1. What We Should All Worry About
When Monitoring Serverless
Applications
Hen Peretz, Epsagon

2. Monitoring/Observability - why do we need it?
Track system health Troubleshoot and fix Optimize
performance/cost

3. > whoami
Hen Peretz (@henprtz )
Senior engineer @ Epsagon
R&D, Embedded @ IDF
Fresh Dad
Tel Aviv

4. From a monolith…

5. To microservices!

6. Let’s talk Serverless

7. Serverless is great!
Pay per use Autoscaling Development velocity

8. Monitoring - What We Should Be Aware Of
Track system health Troubleshoot and fix Optimize
performance/cost

9. Track system health
System == Functions ?

10. The era of APIs
We want managed resources
Applications become
Highly distributed
Highly event-driven
Without access to any server!

11. System != Functions
theburningmonk.com

12. Track system health
System > Functions !
Functions
APIs
Resources

13. Monitoring - What We Should Be Aware Of
Track system health Troubleshoot and fix Optimize
performance/cost

15. Troubleshoot and fix
Functions are not enough
Need: track asynchronous events

16. Transactions

17. Distributed Tracing
A transaction tells the story of a request or data as it propagates through the distributed system.

18. Distributed Tracing

19. Distributed Tracing

20. Implementing Distributed Tracing
Manual tracing
•Before/after calls
•At the end of each micro-service
•High maintenance
•High potential of errors

21. Serverless apps are very distributed
Complex systems have thousands of functions
What about the developer velocity?

22. Unique challenges to Serverless
Timeouts
Out of memory
Cold starts
Retries
Concurrency limit

23. Can it be done
differently in Serverless?

24. Automation can help to keep
up with the
development speed of
Serverless

25. Monitoring - What We Should Be Aware Of
Track system health Troubleshoot and fix Optimize
performance/cost

26. In Serverless Time is Money

27. How much time do you really spend?
Our own code API calls

28. A Real Life Example
Scanning CloudWatch logs using AWS Lambda – every 5
minutes, save to RDS
A new Lambda is spawned for every customer’s function
(async)
Sounds simple and fun!
PollSpawn (async)
CloudWatch

29. $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Then one day...

30. As time flies…
Very small throttle threshold➔
Requests took a very long time➔
5K concurrent Lambdas
For almost 5 minutes
Every 5 minutes
!!!!

31. Another Example
702ms

32. Business Flows
Read Post
Submit Post

33. Business Flows

34. Summing it up
Track system health Troubleshoot and fix Optimize
performance/cost

35. Remove dead functions
https://github.com/epsagon/list-lambdas

36. Lambda Cost Calculator
https://github.com/epsagon/lambda-cost-calculator

37. Thank you!
hen@epsagon.com