Datadog Enhances Monitoring for Serverless Applications in AWS

November 20, 2018 Off By David
Object Storage

Datadog announced comprehensive end-to-end monitoring for AWS Lambda functions. This capability is made possible by the release of a new integration with AWS X-Ray, which traces serverless calls while they run on AWS-operated infrastructure. Traces from AWS X-Ray, as well as metrics and logs data from Lambda functions, are available in a new serverless-centric user interface called Datadog Cloud Functions. Both of these new features are available for public beta.

While serverless functions can simplify development and scaling in certain areas of an application, they have also introduced significant complexity in performance monitoring. AWS Lambda runs on AWS-operated infrastructure where traditional instrumentation methods cannot be deployed. Without insight into this infrastructure, DevOps teams face blind spots where performance issues can occur for applications that rely on AWS Lambda.

AWS X-Ray offers end-to-end views of requests as they travel through an application. Datadog’s new X-Ray integration is able to specifically trace AWS Lambda functions as they execute. These Lambda traces are then combined with log and metric data from Datadog’s hybrid cloud monitoring platform, spanning many other services, application components, and infrastructure areas. This data is made available in the new Cloud Functions UI, where customers can drill down into a single Lambda function and unearth bottlenecks and errors from individual requests.

"Serverless applications are rapidly becoming an important part of our customers’ environments, with significant growth in adoption since AWS Lambda was released," said Daniel Langer, Product Manager at Datadog. "We are expanding our capabilities to enable customers to successfully monitor and troubleshoot serverless applications in Datadog, beginning with Cloud Functions."

"While our SRE team uses Lambda functions for their easy scalability, we were reluctant to endorse them for company-wide production because of the lack of robust monitoring," said Eugene Dvorkin, Technical Architect at Lifion by ADP. "With Datadog’s new serverless monitoring capabilities, we are now confident using AWS Lambda functions in production."

"The Arc Publishing Platform relies on serverless architectures to scale quickly and cost-effectively, but we struggled to find monitoring solutions that compare to our other cloud architectures," said Zach Perry, Director of Platform Engineering at The Washington Post. "Datadog’s new serverless monitoring capabilities allow us to reliably monitor all of our cloud architectures in AWS."