Top Tools for AWS Lambda Monitoring
Helios, AWS CloudFront, AWS X-Ray, OpenTelemetry and more
AWS Lambda is one of the most popular services provided by AWS. High scalability, cost-effectiveness, and the ability to execute code without provisioning or managing servers are the key factors behind its success. With this increased popularity, developers must also get familiar with monitoring and troubleshooting tools to resolve issues in Lambda functions effectively.
So, in this article, I will discuss the top 5 tools for AWS Lambda monitoring to help you improve the monitoring and debugging of your serverless applications.
1. Helios
Helios is an observability and troubleshooting platform that provides actionable insights into your application workflow. It gives end-to-end visibility into Lambda functions, HTTP requests, Kafka, and RabbitMQ messages using OpenTelemetry’s context propagation framework. You can check out their sandbox or use it for free by signing up here.
Helios features:
- Easy Integration: Helios provides 2 types of integrations with AWS Lambda. The first one is the OTel instrumentation, with a lambda layer or serverless plugin and the second one is the AWS metrics integration, with CloudFormation.
- OpenTelemetry for Lambda with Webpack: Helios is the only vendor that supports OpenTelemetry for Lambda with Webpack. Helios resolves the collision between OTel and Webpack when OTel is used to instrument dynamic languages like JavaScript.
- Ease of Deployment: Supports Lambda Layers and serverless framework plugins to make deployments easy.
- Best Data Collection: Collects payloads and excels at context propagation.
- Variety of Metrics: Helios provides a wide range of metrics, including last invocation, number of requests, number of function errors, number of OOMs, number of timeouts, and average duration.
- Language Support: Node.js, Go, Java, and Python.
- Log Monitoring: Can fetch logs from CloudWatch Directly from the Helios platform
Pricing
Helios offers three pricing plans: Free Forever, Pro, and Enterprise. You can find more details on their pricing page.
2. AWS CloudWatch & AWS XRay
AWS CloudWatch and X-Ray are fully managed monitoring and observability tools provided by Amazon Web Services. We can easily use both these services to monitor AWS Lambda functions easily.
AWS CloudWatch
AWS CloudWatch allows developers to collect, track, and analyze real-time metrics, logs, and events from various AWS resources and applications. Furthermore, it provides insights into your infrastructure’s operational health and performance to improve the efficiency of the monitoring and troubleshooting process.
Features to support AWS Lambda monitoring
- Lambda Function Metrics — CloudWatch automatically collects and visualizes Lambda-specific metrics like the number of invocations, duration, and errors.
- Logs Integration — You can easily integrate CloudWatch with CloudWatch Logs to collect, search, and analyze logs generated by your Lambda functions.
- Lambda Insights — Lambda Insights provides detailed observability into Lambda functions, including function-level metrics like initialization time and memory usage.
- Custom Metrics and Alarms — CloudWatch allows you to create custom metrics and set up alarms to trigger notifications or actions based on defined thresholds.
Pricing
AWS CloudWatch does not have any upfront costs. You will be charged based on the number of metrics, dashboards, alarms, logs ingested, and events monitored. It also provides a free tier for new developers to get started. You can find a detailed pricing description here.
AWS X-Ray
AWS X-Ray is a debugging and performance analysis tool that provides end-to-end visibility into distributed applications. You can easily integrate AWS X-Ray with Lambda to monitor and analyze the performance of your Lambda functions. Its automatic instrumentation capabilities allow you to trace Lambda functions without modifying your code.
Features to support AWS Lambda monitoring
- Distributed Tracing — Provides a visual representation of the request flow through Lambda functions, including timing and interactions with various components.
- Service Maps — Generates service maps illustrating the interactions and dependencies between Lambda functions.
- Performance Insights: Provides performance insights on Lambda functions like function duration, resource utilization, and external API calls.
- Error Analysis: Captures and pinpoints errors within your Lambda functions with detailed information about the associated error messages.
Pricing
AWS X-Ray pricing model includes free tier usage and pay-as-you-go pricing. The cost will be calculated based on the number of recorded, analyzed, and stored traces. You can find a detailed pricing description here.
3. Datadog
Datadog is a popular monitoring and analytics platform that provides real-time visibility into your applications, including AWS Lambda functions. It allows developers to visualize metrics and logs related to the application’s health and performance to identify issues beforehand.
Features to support AWS Lambda monitoring
- Detailed Function Tracing: Supports distributed tracing for AWS Lambda functions, allowing developers to trace and analyze the entire lifecycle of requests through serverless applications.
- Log Monitoring and Analysis: You can easily integrate Datadog with AWS CloudWatch to gain insights into the behaviour and performance of Lambda functions.
- Real-time Alerting: You can create actionable alerts and notifications based on predefined thresholds or conditions.
- Cold Start Analysis: Provides cold start insights to identify which Lambda functions require Lambda pings or provision concurrency enabled.
Pricing
Datadog has multiple pricing plans based on features and scale. You can find detailed and up-to-date information on the pricing plans here.
4. New Relic##
New Relic is another widespread monitoring and observability tool that support AWS Lambda monitoring. It offers a dedicated service named “New Relic Eagle” for distributed tracing ensuring 100% observability of application traces.
Features to support AWS Lambda monitoring
- Serverless-Specific Instrumentation: New Relic lets you capture detailed performance data like initialization time and memory usage at the function level with serverless-specific instrumentation.
- Real-time Performance Monitoring: Supports monitoring your AWS Lambda functions in real-time with metrics like invocation count, duration, error rates, and resource consumption.
- Error Analysis and Alerting: You can trigger alerts and notifications when the number of errors in a Lambda function exceeds a defined threshold.
Pricing
New Relic pricing is mainly based on the data amount and number of users. You can find more details on their pricing page.
5. OpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework that allows you to collect telemetry data from your applications, including AWS Lambda functions. It supports all the major programming languages, including Java, JavaScript, Python, Go, Ruby, and C++.
Features to support AWS Lambda monitoring
- Automatic Instrumentation: OpenTelemetry automatic instrumentation simplifies collecting telemetry data from Lambda functions.
- Distributed Tracing: Support distributed tracing to trace requests through Lambda functions and other services effectively.
- Flexible Exporters: Offers a range of exporters to send telemetry data to multiple monitoring and analytics platforms like Jaeger and Zipkin.
Pricing
OpenTelemetry is an open-source framework. It is available free of charge.
Wrapping up
As AWS Lambda continues to be the number 1 choice for building scalable and cost-effective serverless solutions, maintaining a robust monitoring system is essential to identifying potential issues and ensuring high performance.
However, choosing one is challenging since there are multiple tools available. For example, Helios is the only tool that provides OpenTelemetry support for Lambda with Webpack to gain end-to-end visibility of your lambda functions. Similarly, AWS CloudWatch and X-Ray are fully managed AWS services provided by AWS to gain more insights into Lambda functions.
I hope these suggestions will help you to monitor and troubleshoot your Lambda functions quickly and easily. Thank you for reading.
