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.

1. AWS Observability
without the pain
Eóin Shanaghy - Luciano Mammino
AWS Summer School - June 24th 2021

2. Hi! I’m Eoin 🙂
CTO
aiasaservicebook.com
@eoins
eoins
✉ Get in touch

3. 👋 Hello, I am Luciano
Senior architect
nodejsdesignpatterns.com
Let’s connect:
🌎 loige.co
🐦 @loige
🎥 loige
🧳 lucianomammino

4. We are business focused technologists
that deliver.
Accelerated Serverless | AI as a Service | Platform Modernisation
We are hiring! Let’s have a chat 🙂

5. fth.link/o11y-no-pain

6. 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
“

7. AWS native o11y = CloudWatch
Cloudwatch gives you:
➔ Logs with Insights
➔ Metrics
➔ Dashboards
➔ Alarms
➔ Canaries
➔ Distributed tracing (with X-Ray)

8. Outside AWS
Established
New entrants
Roll your own (only for the brave)

9. 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!

10. ✅ 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

11. 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!)

12. 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

13. CloudFormation for CloudWatch Alarms 😬
"Type": "AWS::CloudWatch::Alarm",
"Properties": {
"ActionsEnabled": true,
"AlarmActions": [
"arn:aws:sns:eu-west-1:665863320777:FTSLICAlarms"
],
"AlarmName": "LambdaThrottles_serverless-test-project-dev-hello",
"AlarmDescription": "Throttles % for serverless-test-project-dev-hello ..",
"EvaluationPeriods": 1,
"ComparisonOperator": "GreaterThanThreshold",
"Threshold": 0,
"TreatMissingData": "notBreaching",
"Metrics": [
{
"Id": "throttles_pc",
"Expression": "(throttles / throttles + invocations) * 100",
"Label": "% Throttles",
"ReturnData": true
},
{
"Id": "throttles",
"MetricStat": {
"Metric": {
"Namespace": "AWS/Lambda",
"MetricName": "Throttles",
"Dimensions": [
{
"Name": "FunctionName",
"Value": "serverless-test-project-dev-hello"
}
]
},
"Period": 60,
"Stat": "Sum"
},
"ReturnData": false
},
{
"Id": "invocations",
"MetricStat": {
"Metric": {
"Namespace": "AWS/Lambda",
"MetricName": "Invocations",

14. Can we automate this?
Magically
generated alarms
and dashboards for
each application!

15. fth.link/slic-watch
Introducing
SLIC Watch

16. How SLIC Watch works 🛠
Your app
serverless.yml
sls deploy
CloudFormation stack
very-big.json
SLIC Watch
👀 🛠
CloudFormation stack ++
even-bigger.json
Deploy ☁
📊📈

17. Before SLIC Watch

18. After SLIC Watch

19. After SLIC Watch

20. After SLIC Watch

21. After SLIC Watch

22. After SLIC Watch
Check out SLIC Slack

23. Configuration
🎀 SLIC Watch comes with sane defaults
📝 You can configure what you don’t like
🔌 Or disable specific dashboards or alarms

24. 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!

25. 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!

26. Thank you!
fth.link/o11y-no-pain
Cover picture by Javier Balseiro on Unsplash