Monitoring platform for keeping systems up and running at all times.
Full stack visibility across the entire stack.
Detect and resolve any incident in record time.
Conform to industry best practices.
Some time ago, AWS forked ElasticSearch, the most popular search engine on the planet. They had some struggles with the maintainer of ElasticSearch and decided it was time to part ways. So, with OpenSearch, there is now a new kid in town. Well, not new, but at least some kind of alternative.
With OpenSearch Service (OSS), AWS released a new service to manage their forked search engine. It can still run older versions of Elasticsearch, but it will focus on OpenSearch releases in the future.
The setup and scaling of Elasticsearch were tricky, and this hasn’t changed much with OpenSearch. OSS is here to help with that by handling the laborious tasks of running a service. Managing infrastructure, updating software, and so on.
The nice part is, with its t2.search and t3.search EC2 instances, OSS is even qualified for the AWS free tier.
Before the internet, getting information on any topic was the main issue people faced back in the day. In today’s world, where everyone has access to all of human knowledge, the new problem is to find the information you need in that vast sea of data.
Finding and filtering information is crucial for any business; sooner or later, you will find a search engine like OpenSearch at the heart of your operation. A central system lets customers and co-workers locate all the information they need to do their job.
Since a search engine can be mission-critical, monitoring it is a must. Like any service you’re operating, getting insight into it is essential; otherwise, you’ll have many issues. It could cost you more than necessary, or it couldn’t keep up with rising traffic, and you wouldn’t notice. And, of course, if a system as vital as a search engine experiences errors, it’s good to get notified before your users start calling you.
Different facets of an OpenSearch cluster can be interesting. Sometimes it’s performance; sometimes, it’s security. Let’s look at what AWS offers in terms of monitoring.
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. Also, how the number of queries varies over time and if you got enough space left to index data.
You can get answers to all these questions with CloudWatch. OSS will automatically send metrics to CloudWatch, so you know how OpenSearch behaves from a technical perspective.
If you see performance issues, you need a way to find out what is causing them. Nobody likes slow queries! You should monitor your errors and slow queries, indexed or not.
You can find these logs in CloudWatch Logs, which automatically gathers this data. Is your memory filled up? Check out if a query is causing it. Your error metrics are rising? It might be one bug that throws frequently.
Another crucial part is the audit logs. They give you a list of actions different users have taken on your OpenSearch cluster, so if things start going awry one day, you can check which change caused it.
Audit logs are also suitable for legal reasons. Sometimes it’s essential to know if someone had some information at a specific time in the past, and if you have fine-grained access control, you see who accessed what and when.
You can find them in CloudTrail; another monitoring service automatically set up by AWS for you.
Some time ago, Dashbird added support to monitor OSS. This means you can get all the information we discussed above in one place, plus some extras!
With Dashbird’s Well-Architected Insights, you get helpful notifications about OSS. This includes information about misconfigurations and tips to optimize your deployments to save money, improve reliability, and secure your systems in the cloud.
With this info, you can be sure to react quickly to changes and make informed decisions about things that might go wrong in the future.
OpenSearch is the tool that answers your user’s questions in a central location, and with OSS, you can save time and money on setup and maintenance. Downtime will directly impact your users, and you will end with a swash of complaints quickly. That’s why monitoring OSS is crucial.
With the recent addition of OSS to Dashbird, you can now sleep well again because all vital information is located in one place to ensure everything is configured correctly and things are going well.
Further reading:
[Infographic] OpenSearch from a serverless perspective
Dashbird now integrates with 5 new AWS services
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.
Today we are announcing a new, updated pricing model and the end of free tier for Dashbird.
In this article, we’re covering 4 tips for AWS Lambda optimization for production. Covering error handling, memory provisioning, monitoring, performance, and more.
Dashbird was born out of our own need for an enhanced serverless debugging and monitoring tool, and we take pride in being developers.
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.