Things you might have missed when using Dashbird

Taavi Rehemägi

May 9th, 2019

Just starting out with Dashbird? Great, you are in the right place.

I’ve been speaking with hundreds of our new users in the past couple of months about their experience with Dashbird. I must say the feedback has been incredible so far. However, there are a few things I’ve noticed that our users haven’t yet taken advantage of within the platform. For better success, let me point them out to you.

If you haven’t tried out Dashbird yet and would like to follow along, feel free to try Dashbird out yourself – in the worst-case scenario you will end up finding errors you didn’t have a clue of. Set up is an easy 2-minute process without any code changes.

Confusion around the alerting

In order to be on top of your serverless stack and get notified at the right time, we recommend setting up both error and metrics alerting. In order to do that you must:

First set up the notification channels under Settings -> Organization -> Notifications (tutorial). We currently support email and Slack notifications.
For error alerting, go to Errors –> Policies add a new policy by clicking + ADD. Be sure to add a notification channel you set up in the previous stage. Under conditions you can modify what kind of alerts (CRASH, TIMEOUT, OUT OF MEMORY, CONFIGURATION ERROR, EARLY EXIT) you would like to receive. Also, you can choose if you like to receive an alert for a certain function, project, or all of your stack (detailed instructions).
For metrics alerting, go to Alerting –> Polices. Similarly, to the previous step, add a new policy and set up the notification channels. You can choose to open a new incident (get alerted) per policy, condition or a certain target. There are many ways to configure the conditions and every company has different needs, but for better success, we have pointed out the best practices for metric alerts that you can follow.

Handling errors

Managing errors can be a real pain sometimes. To relieve the pain, Dashbird is grouping together all the similar errors for a certain Lambda. Nobody wants to deal with 50k errors separately, am I right?

error handling

There are in total of three error states (OPEN, RESOLVED, MUTED) where the error can sit. Every time a new error occurs it will be in the OPEN state. After fixing the error, be sure to mark it RESOLVED. Otherwise, you will not be notified the next time when that error occurs.

You can resolve errors from the top right corner of the errors page and view resolved errors under the “RESOLVED” tab.

If an error is unimportant for you, you can mute notifications for it and discard it from the active errors list to reduce clutter.

“Error handling is for sure one of the most interesting things about Dashbird. Those who haven’t checked it out, are missing out!” – Hendry Sadrak, CTO at Modash, a database for finding instagram influencers.

Managing environments and microservices

It is always a good practice to have separate AWS accounts for different environments. Mostly it is because of security, development speed, billing etc. If you have separate accounts – great, you can onboard all of them to Dashbird by using Organizations.

However, if haven’t done it or you want to separate your microservices, you can do it by grouping together Lambda functions under the Projects view. This will allow you to better monitor, analyze and debug your functions. Projects can also be targets to error or metrics alerting conditions, so you will only track what is necessary. Here’s a short guide on how to set up your projects.

Conclusion

At Dashbird we release new features very often and therefore some of the most important things might get unnoticed. We try to notify all the important updates by newsletter, but feel free to check out our blog and docs from time to time for the latest information.

You can sign up for a Dashbird account here. If you have any questions just book a call with me and I can help you set up your account for success.

Read our blog

Introducing easy custom event monitoring for serverless applications.

Today we are excited to announce scheduled searches – a new feature on Dashbird that allows you to track any log event across your stack, turn it into time-series metric and also configure alert notifications based on it.

Why and How to Monitor Amazon OpenSearch Service

One of the most vital aspects to monitor is the metrics. You should know how your cluster performs and if it can keep up with the traffic. Learn more about monitoring Amazon OpenSearch Service.

Why and How to Monitor AWS Elastic Load Balancing

Dashbird recently added support for ELB, so now you can keep track of your load balancers in one central place. It comes with all the information you expect from AWS monitoring services and more!

Made by developers for developers

Dashbird was born out of our own need for an enhanced serverless debugging and monitoring tool, and we take pride in being developers.

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What our customers say

Dashbird gives us a simple and easy to use tool to have peace of mind and know that all of our Serverless functions are running correctly. We are instantly aware now if there’s a problem. We love the fact that we have enough information in the Slack notification itself to take appropriate action immediately and know exactly where the issue occurred.

Thanks to Dashbird the time to discover the occurrence of an issue reduced from 2-4 hours to a matter of seconds or minutes. It also means that hundreds of dollars are saved every month.

Great onboarding: it takes just a couple of minutes to connect an AWS account to an organization in Dashbird. The UI is clean and gives a good overview of what is happening with the Lambdas and API Gateways in the account.

I mean, it is just extremely time-saving. It’s so efficient! I don’t think it’s an exaggeration or dramatic to say that Dashbird has been a lifesaver for us.

Dashbird provides an easier interface to monitor and debug problems with our Lambdas. Relevant logs are simple to find and view. Dashbird’s support has been good, and they take product suggestions with grace.

Great UI. Easy to navigate through CloudWatch logs. Simple setup.

Dashbird helped us refine the size of our Lambdas, resulting in significantly reduced costs. We have Dashbird alert us in seconds via email when any of our functions behaves abnormally. Their app immediately makes the cause and severity of errors obvious.