Migrating from Epsagon to Dashbird

Tobias Schmidt

October 18th, 2021

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With over 200 products offered by AWS, when designing a solution, such as a micro-services based system using a number of these services at its core, it becomes rather challenging to not only monitor them but on the onset of a problem troubleshooting it and resolving it within the least amount of time becomes a daunting task. Building a monitorable system requires a deep understanding of the failure domain of the critical components, which is a tall order for a fairly complex system. Hence the need for a robust observability tool dedicated to performing all these tasks is essential for organizations to have their systems run smoothly and keep the costs in check.

One of such tools is Epsagon. Epsagon simplifies monitoring for cloud-native services, including serverless applications. It integrates easily with your commonly used AWS services and automatically discovers your application stack. Automated tracing libraries collect application-level calls without any need for code changes, configurations or additional logs. However, it might not fully cater to every need of developers building on AWS.

Dashbird is a good alternative to Epsagon specifically for AWS users. Dashbird is a serverless-first observability, debugging, and intelligence platform designed specifically to help serverless developers build, operate, improve, and scale their modern cloud applications on AWS environment fast, securely, and with ease. It’s forever free to use for up to 1M monthly Lambda executions and doesn’t require any code changes. And offers budget-friendly fixed price tiers for teams with larger infrastructures. See what’s included in each tier package.

Serverless architecture fundamentally changes how we build, deploy, and maintain software. Although AWS CloudWatch can be used to monitor cloud resources, it was not designed for the challenge and doesn’t have all the necessary data readily available. Dashbird fills the gaps left by CloudWatch and other traditional monitoring tools by offering enhanced out-of-the-box monitoring, operations, and actionable insights tools for architectural improvements, all in one place.

Dashbird’s approach is fairly simple, all the mission-critical data of your entire serverless system is placed in a single dashboard giving you a birds-eye-view of the entire system activity. Moreover, you get immediate alerts on any errors or warnings that may arise and get pointed to the exact point of failure in the system so it can be resolved fast.

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Migrating from Epsagon to Dashbird

Migrating your serverless application from Epsagon to Dashbird is straightforward and does not require much effort.

• First, you’ll need to delete the Epsagon delegation CloudFormation stack via your AWS Console in the region where you created it in the first place (generally your “main” or default region)
• Secondly, if you’re using the automated tracing agents which are sending metrics to Epsagon, remove them from your applications
• The last step is to register at Dashbird.io and follow the OnBoarding guide below – it only takes 2 minutes to set up and requires a one-click creation of the delegation CloudFormation stack.

4. Getting started with Dashbird is really simple. Go to Dashbird.io and click on “Quick start” or just click HERE which will take you to the signup page.

• You’ll be asked to provide an email and password. In case you’ve already done that please sign in here and continue to the next step.

• After confirming your email you’ll be redirected to the following screen. Enter a suitable name for your organization. Then click “next”.

• Next, enter a name for your project and select what you are expecting to get by using Dashbird.

• Now we connect our AWS account with Dashbird. Dashbird has created a CloudFormation template that automatically creates a role in your AWS account delegating read-only access to various services in your account. Dashbird uses this role to get the metrics, logs, and traces data for the services in your account.
• Just click on the “Add Dashbird CloundFormation Stack to AWS” link and you’ll be redirected to CloudFormation Console in your account. There click on the create stack and Dashbird stack will be created shortly. Once the stack is created you just have to copy the DashbirdDelegationRole ARN from the outputs tabs in the CloudFormation console and submit it in the dashbird’s onboarding as can be seen below.

• We are finally done with the onboarding process with just one last step left. After you have submitted the ARN and clicked next dashbird will now automatically fetch metrics, logs, and traces information of the resources in your account. This step will take only a couple of minutes. Once complete you’ll be redirected to the Dashbird dashboard. And that’s it – after the 2-minute onboarding process you are done and can start debugging and working with your data immediately!

Dashbird works by collecting logs, metrics and listing resources under your AWS account. To do that, we need limited access to your account. After completing the registration form a custom CloudFormation template is generated for you. For details of what this template contains, check out this cloudformation template.

It can take a few minutes until the stack creation completes.