Serverless updates you might have missed on Dashbird in 2020 that will help you in 2021
By: Taavi Rehemägi
Tags: AWS Lambda, AWS, Serverless, Cloud Computing, Microservices

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

If you haven’t tried out Dashbird yet and would like to follow along, feel free to give Dashbird a try 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 or credit card required.

A loyal user of Dashbird? You’re at the right place too, as we’ve evolved and improved as a monitoring platform a lot this year. And we’re pretty sure you might have missed some of our recent feature releases.

So here we go!

Inventory

Having previously exclusively served AWS Lambda, earlier this year, Dashbird added more AWS services to our roster for serverless monitoring, observability, and optimization opportunities. The Inventory list includes:

The addition of these instrumental services and resources in the Dashbird monitoring platform gives you even greater autonomy and understanding of your Serverless infrastructure. With the ability to drill down into the details, set up alerts, and watch for trends and patterns, Dashbird offers one of the fullest Serverless observability platforms available today. All without any code or architectural changes. You just have to deploy CloudFormation template to your AWS, we’ll do the rest.

Well-Architected and Best-Practice Insights

We don’t only just show you data!

Dashbird features a continuous rule engine for detecting and enforcing Serverless Well-Architected practices. Dashbird is constantly running users’ infrastructure data through its WAF rule engines detecting anomalies and weaknesses within the architecture, and notifying the users of critical errors and/or when improvements should be made.

This allows developers to build and operate complex Well-Architected serverless applications without compromising its reliability over time and also be able to layer on complexity later on.

Metric Alarms

In addition to the Inventory, we also added the Metric Alarms feature. Its simplicity — choosing a metric important to you, setting its status to ‘critical’ or ‘warning’, and pointing to the relevant resources and the person this alarm should reach — lets you cut through the noise, meaning alert fatigue and complex alarms can be a thing of the past. You can be confident that important information reaches the correct person in time!

Used in conjunction with Dashbird Insights Engine, Metric Alarm allows users to gain greater assurance over SLAs/SLIs and to customize their infrastructure based on solid insight.

For example, here we have configured a critical alarm to be triggered when the queue has reached 10 or more items. This alarm helps detect situations like when the queue consumers cannot keep up with new messages in the queue — that is when messages arrive faster than they can be processed.

So whenever that happens, Alex from our dev team gets notified in real-time via Slack (his preferred channel).

Detailed Usage Report

The Detailed Usage Report provides another element to the metrics and insights Dashbird already offers. Shown by; Usage by Region and by Type, Data Ingested by Region and by Lambda, and Lambda Invocation, it’s one step easier to spot trends and patterns for better optimization.

For example, understanding the pattern of a well-used Lambda from this starting point, users can then look into its related billing and resource usage patterns to identify if savings can be made in either AWS or Dashbird.

Notifications Channel & New Communication Channels

Dashbird has now enabled alerts and alarms to be sent through AWS SNS and Webhooks, making automation and autoscaling even easier and more seamless. Out-of-the-box notifications can be set up, as can the customized ones.

Understanding that each company’s workflow is different, the Notification Channel now makes it easier to point alerts to a specific team member or group for faster internal communication, acknowledgement and remediation.

Dashbird app got a shiny new look

The new and improved Dashbird app’s main screen is designed to give you a quick overview of the most important events and metrics across your serverless environment. Jump in and check it out!

If you’re not a Dashbird user, you can learn more and sign up for free.