AWS News Blog: Track performance of serverless applications built using AWS Lambda with Application Signals

Source URL: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/track-performance-of-serverless-applications-built-using-aws-lambda-with-application-signals/
Source: AWS News Blog
Title: Track performance of serverless applications built using AWS Lambda with Application Signals

Feedly Summary: Gain deep visibility into AWS Lambda performance with CloudWatch Application Signals, eliminating manual monitoring complexities and improving serverless app health.

AI Summary and Description: Yes

Summary: Amazon has introduced CloudWatch Application Signals, an application performance monitoring (APM) solution that simplifies monitoring performance for applications hosted on its cloud services. This new feature improves productivity for developers by automating the correlation of metrics, traces, and logs, specifically for AWS Lambda functions, and eliminates the complexities of manual setup.

Detailed Description:
Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals is designed to enhance application performance monitoring within AWS. Here’s a comprehensive overview of its features and implications:

– **Purpose**: The solution addresses the complexities of monitoring distributed applications hosted on AWS services such as Amazon EKS, ECS, EC2, and now AWS Lambda.
– **Automatic Correlation**: Application Signals automatically correlates telemetry across various sources (metrics, traces, and logs), facilitating faster troubleshooting and minimizing application downtime.
– **Focus on Performance**: By providing deep insights into application performance, Application Signals enables developers to focus on improving their applications rather than managing underlying server health.
– **Golden Metrics**: Users can collect essential application metrics, including request volume, latency, and error rates, necessary for evaluating application health.
– **Reduction of MTTR**: The tool aims to decrease the mean time to recovery (MTTR) by eliminating the need to manually correlate logs and metrics from different systems, thus reducing operational costs.
– **Seamless Integration**: Application Signals requires no manual coding or instrumentation changes, allowing easier deployment and operational efficiency.
– **Enhanced AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT)**: Auto-instrumentation through ADOT libraries aids in reducing latency and active resource consumption, improving the overall monitoring experience.
– **Service Level Objectives (SLOs)**: Users can define SLOs to measure performance against specific metrics that are critical to business operations.
– **User Experience**: Pre-built dashboards facilitate quick identification of performance anomalies, allowing for a more straightforward troubleshooting process through visualizations of application topology and dependencies.
– **General Availability**: The feature is now generally available for Lambda functions utilizing Python and Node.js with plans for future support of additional runtimes.

**Key Benefits for Security and Compliance Professionals**:
– Enhanced visibility into application performance can lead to better security measures, as anomalous behavior may indicate security incidents.
– Streamlining application monitoring aligns with compliance requirements for maintaining high availability and performance.
– The integration of performance insights with security protocols fosters a proactive approach in addressing potential vulnerabilities or threats.

By utilizing CloudWatch Application Signals, companies can ensure their applications operate at peak performance while simplifying compliance with monitoring and operational standards.