Monitoring Serverless Applications
With Datadog

Intro
– Rachel White
– Technical Evangelist @ Datadog
– @ohhoe on twitter if you have any additional questions

Overview
– Traditional vs Serverless Applications
– Twitter Bots
– Generative Art
– Serverless (AWS Lambda)
– Monitoring a Serverless Application

What is Serverless?

Traditional Architecture
– LAMP, MAMP, MEAN, JAM
– 100% Uptime
– Full Control over Software Versioning
– Usually Monoliths

Microservice Architecture
– Can run across multiple stacks
– Separate Deploys
– Modular

Serverless
– Cloud provider executes code
– Don’t have to think about servers at all
– Pay only for what you use
– Easier to adapt to demand at scale

AWS Lambda
– Zero Administration
– Automatically allocates compute execution power
– Set code to automatically trigger
– Write in your favorite programming language

Monitoring serverless with Datadog

How do you debug a server that doesn’t exist?
🤔

How do you debug a server that doesn’t exist…
in this?

Serverless Platform Specific Constraints
Allocated Memory Usage
Cold Starts
API Gateways as Intermediaries
Commonly Called via Queues

3 Step Configuration for Serverless Full Visibility
1. Enable AWS
Integration
2. Add the Forwarder
3. Instrument Your Language

Traces, Logs and Metrics Across Infra Platforms

Lambda Forwarder

Use Datadog to Pivot Between Abstractions
APM for Service / Application Level Problems
Serverless Metrics & Dashboards for Platform State
Service Map for Overall Application Architecture
Metrics for Overall Business Processes / State
Enrich with RUM for Visibility into End User Experience

Twitter Bot Time

Serverless Framework
– Open Source CLI
– Write once, Deploy many
– Quick AWS integration
– serverless.com

AWS
– Lambda function
– S3 bucket
– Cloudflare cron trigger

Datadog
– AWS integration
– Lambda Forwarder
– AWS X-Ray for distributed application tracing

Node.js Application
– Create base64 dataURI image
– Different every time
– Pulls color info from colourlovers
– AWS-SDK
– Twit - API client for Node

Twitter Bots
– Used to be very popular pre-closed API time
– Image Based
– Markov Chain / ML text gen

Soft Landscapes

Soft Landscapes

Bracket Meme Bot
@BracketMemeBot - http://tinysubversions.com/notes/bracket-meme-bot/

Twitter Bots
– http://www.tracery.io
– https://cheapbotsdonequick.com
– https://github.com/dariusk/corpora
– https://botwiki.org/

Let’s Code!