Four immediate benefits you will gain from a modern monitoring platform

Cloud applications don’t just run flawlessly by way of magic. Many things can go wrong, and rest assured some will go wrong at one point. For small teams, this can be cumbersome and take a toll at the development speed.

A monitoring system will detect these issues on behalf of the development team, so that they can act accordingly. At Dashbird, we think there’s much more to it, though, than just detecting and alerting issues, especially for small teams of developers.

Issue management and collaboration

Any cloud application with minimal complexity will generate a reasonable amount of issues on a frequent basis. Especially those that are under active development.

The development teams behind such applications need a way to manage these issues. As an illustration point, the team should be able to visualize and control in a user-friendly way: issues that are open, which ones were already resolved and which have been temporarily muted, for example.

Quality tracking

Quickly visualizing past occurrences of the same issue can be important, as these cases require further investigation. They also indicate that current bug fixing approaches may not be working as expected.

Event-driven debugging

Developers won’t have the time to keep monitoring application logs for themselves, so they need a monitoring tool that alerts them proactively when something requires their attention:

An automated alerting system may sound something trivial that any service provider can offer. The key, though, is to know what to look for. In an immense amount of application logs, it’s easy for the monitor to miss relevant signals.

The alerting mechanism should detect not only application errors, but also infrastructure faults that can affect the application indirectly. In case of AWS Lambda, this would include timeouts, container crashes, memory exhaustion and more.

For parts of the system that are more tolerant to faults, developers may disable individual issue alerting and set up aggregation metrics. This allows to shift attention from development to debugging only when it’s really required.

Fast communication

When something goes wrong in an application, developers are usually running against time to mitigate damages and fix the root cause. Not only receiving alerts is important, but getting them in the fastest and most convenient way is also essential to save time.

Nowadays, most development teams are using instant messaging services such as Slack. Having a #channel dedicated to receiving issue alerts can help developers cut through the noise and get alerted to react immediately.

All of the features discussed above and much more are available on Dashbird, the leading monitoring platform for serverless and managed cloud services. Thousands of smart developers are already using it and you can too by signing up for our 14-day free trialNo credit-card required!

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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.

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.