Making serverless applications reliable and bug-free

Taavi Rehemägi

October 7th, 2024

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Building applications using serverless technology on AWS—like AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway—can be incredibly powerful. You get to scale effortlessly and focus on writing code without worrying about managing servers. But as your application grows and spreads across hundreds or even thousands of cloud resources, keeping track of errors and fixing issues quickly becomes a big challenge. Since you don’t have direct access to the underlying servers, you have to rely on external logs and metrics, which can sometimes feel like searching for a needle in a haystack.

In this guide, we’ll talk about common problems developers face with serverless applications on AWS and share some practical strategies to help you monitor and manage your applications more effectively.

Common Challenges with Serverless Applications

1. Too Many Resources and Data Overload: With so many functions and services running, you can end up with an overwhelming amount of logs and metrics. It becomes hard to spot the real issues when there’s so much data.
2. No Access to the Servers: Since AWS manages the servers for you, you can’t dive into the underlying compute resources to troubleshoot problems. You’re limited to the information that AWS provides.
3. Frequent Changes and Deployments: Serverless applications are designed to be agile, which often means you’re deploying updates multiple times a day. Keeping your monitoring tools up-to-date with all these changes can be tough.

Strategies to Improve Monitoring and Reliability

Here are some tips to help you stay on top of your serverless applications:

1. Focus on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Critical Parts

Instead of setting up alarms for every single resource (which can get messy fast), concentrate on the most important parts of your application that directly affect your users.

• Identify Critical Services: Figure out which parts of your app are most important for your users. For example, API endpoints that users interact with directly. Also, monitoring top level items allows you to catch underlying failures without covering every piece of infrastructure with alarms.
• Set User-Focused Alarms: Set up alarms that notify you when something goes wrong with these critical services. For instance, if an API call is taking too long or failing, you should know about it right away.
• Be Ready to Act: These alarms should prompt immediate action. If something critical breaks, you want to be alerted so you can fix it ASAP—even if it’s outside of normal working hours. If often you get alarms that don’t really require action it can happen that over time you will not be paying attention to the alarm channels.

By focusing on what’s most important, you simplify your monitoring and make sure you’re aware of issues that truly impact your users. Using third-party services, such as Dashbird can help you set the right alarms and make sure the alerts always reach the right destination and are not missed.

2. Automate Your Alarms and Monitoring

With your application changing all the time, manually setting up alarms for every new resource isn’t practical. Automation is your friend here. At Dashbird, we have fo

• Use Infrastructure as Code Tools: Tools like AWS CloudFormation or the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) let you define your infrastructure in code. This way, your alarms and resources are created together automatically.
• Leverage Automated Monitoring Tools: AWS Trusted Advisor gives you recommendations and insights to help you follow best practices. You can also use third-party tools like Dashbird that are designed specifically for serverless applications.
• Integrate with Your CI/CD Pipeline: Make sure your alarm configurations are part of your deployment process. That way, whenever you deploy new code, your monitoring updates automatically.

Automation saves time and reduces the chance of human error, ensuring that you’re always keeping an eye on the right things. With Dashbird, all your resources and automatically covered with alarms and we constantly update our alarm policies with the latest best practices of the industry.

3. Reduce Alarm Fatigue with Targeted Notifications

Getting too many alerts can be overwhelming, and important notifications might get ignored if they’re buried in noise.

• Send Alerts to the Right People: Make sure that only the team members who need to see certain alerts get them. For example, database alerts go to the database team, frontend issues go to the frontend team.
• Set Up Different Alert Levels: Not all issues are equally urgent. Set up different levels of alerts—some that notify only the relevant team during work hours, and critical ones that alert everyone immediately.
• Use Incident Management Tools: Services like AWS Incident Manager or PagerDuty can help you manage alerts, set up on-call schedules, and make sure issues are escalated properly.

By tailoring alerts to the right people and setting appropriate urgency levels, you can ensure important issues are addressed promptly without overwhelming your team. With Dashbird, incident management is built in and it’s easy to configure the right alarms to the right channels so bugs are always discovered quickly.

More Tips for Keeping Your Applications Reliable

• Centralize Your Logs: Use AWS CloudWatch Logs and AWS X-Ray to keep all your logs and traces in one place. This makes it easier to search through logs and see how different parts of your application are working together.
• Use Custom Metrics: Sometimes the default metrics aren’t enough. You can publish your own metrics that are specific to your application, giving you more detailed insights.
• Make Your Application Observable: Add logging and tracing into your code so you can see what’s happening inside your application. This helps you find and fix issues faster.
• Review Regularly: Take time to review your monitoring setup and make sure it’s still effective as your application grows and changes. Practice responding to incidents so your team is prepared.
• Follow Best Practices: Check out the AWS Well-Architected Framework, especially the Reliability Pillar, for guidance on building reliable systems.

Try Dashbird for Better Serverless Monitoring

If you’re looking for a tool to help you monitor your serverless applications more effectively, consider trying Dashbird. Dashbird is designed specifically for serverless architectures and offers features like:

• Automatic Alarm Setup: Dashbird can automatically set up alarms and monitoring for your serverless resources, so you don’t have to do it all manually.
• Detailed Error Reports: Get detailed information about errors in your Lambda functions and other services, so you can fix issues faster.
• User-Friendly Dashboard: See all your logs, metrics, and alerts in one easy-to-use dashboard.

By using Dashbird, you can improve your monitoring, reduce unnecessary alerts, and keep your serverless applications running smoothly. Give Dashbird a try and see how it can help you manage your serverless applications more effectively.

Conclusion

Managing serverless applications comes with its own set of challenges, but with the right strategies, you can keep your applications reliable and your users happy.

• Focus on what’s important: Monitor the critical parts of your application that affect your users the most.
• Automate your monitoring: Use tools and automation to keep your monitoring up-to-date without a lot of manual work.
• Reduce noise: Send alerts to the right people and set appropriate alert levels to prevent overload.

By staying proactive and continuously improving your monitoring practices—and using tools like Dashbird—you can ensure your serverless applications on AWS are robust, responsive, and ready to handle whatever comes next.