What is Serverless Monitoring and Observability?

Research shows that fixing bugs is a developer’s top challenge , with 88% of developers complaining that traditional error monitoring falls short. Serverless and functions architecture help deal with some of these modern monitoring challenges. Serverless technology simplifies building software, and debugging its small instances is more convenient than debugging a cluttered monolithic app with a cumbersome codebase. It’s easier to find and debug a bottleneck in a simple function than in a gigantic block of code.

But, if improperly applied, going serverless could make detecting and fixing errors even more complex than with the typical monolithic approach. That’s why developers should choose the right serverless or functions provider if they want their monitoring and observability to actually work in their benefit and not against them.

This article focuses on serverless monitoring and observability, discusses their implications, and looks at several tools designed to overcome these gaps. Developers, solopreneurs, and startups will find some advice to select the right tools to make sure their serverless systems work as expected.

What is serverless monitoring and observability?

Serverless monitoring and observability is the practice — and the tools — that report on serverless applications so they can perform better, even while they are in production.

In serverless computing, the infrastructure is managed by a provider, and this allows developers to focus entirely on code without managing servers. A good monitoring and observability suite should allow a developer to easily debug an app in the worst-case scenario, and simply fine-tune it in the best case.

Monitoring and observability may sound similar, but they do different things. Monitoring collects metrics about an application, such as CPU usage, memory consumption, and error rates, to check how serverless functions are performing. Observability goes a step further and presents a more in-depth understanding of an app’s internal state using metrics, traces, and logs. While monitoring tracks the apps’ behaviour, observability helps find and address unanticipated issues, and shows how the app performs under different conditions.

Every item off this list ultimately impacts the user, so monitoring and observing in serverless is about turning in the best possible experience on any solution, including a SaaS running on a full-stack web app.

(In case you are not familiar with the term, logs are a record of events within the application. Multi-million dollar market segments were built from the ground up thanks to logs; traces are a representation of how a request interacted in a distributed system; metrics are the numerical representation of these interactions).

Monitoring serverless applications for developers

In serverless apps, monitoring and observability are tied to the business health and to the user experience.

A serverless user won’t be monitoring the servers to know how to handle the workload or how to scale up. That falls entirely on the serverless provider. But that same provider should include tools that can help improve or fine-tune the user experience. Monitoring and observability in serverless should do exactly that and no more than that. A good monitoring and observability suite should allow a developer to easily debug an app in the worst-case scenario, and simply fine-tune it in the best case.

So, for example, with good monitoring tools built into a serverless platform, a developer should be able to draw up facts about how, on a SaaS, the login experience, response times, or latency are working out for users. The same developer should be able to spot out an issue quickly thanks to these tools.

The importance of serverless monitoring and observability

The event-driven nature of serverless apps, where functions trigger based on specific events, should mean debugging a web app is easier than debugging a monolith, because the codebase is more distributed. Without proper observability tools, it’s likely problems will go unnoticed.

Centralized logging and distributed tracing are very useful in this context. Centralized logging gathers logs from all functions in one place to provide a complete view of the application’s activity. Distributed tracing tracks requests as they go through different parts to detect issues that might cause delays or difficulties in the future.

Monitoring and observability are important because they help keep your application running well while using just the adequate resources. For example, with the right FaaS provider, you can cut back on functions that use too many resources. This action directly drives down your cloud subscription fee.

What should and can be observed in serverless platforms?

There are different areas that can be monitored to keep serverless applications working properly. The typical elements to catch any anomaly are the metrics, the logs, and the traces.

With each, you can watch how your serverless functions are working first. With these metrics, developers can understand how long each function takes to run — execution time — or how much memory it uses, and how many instances of the function are running at once, known as concurrency. If there’s a function running too slowly, you can tell by monitoring it.

Cold starts , a common issue in serverless environments, happen when a function is called after being idle for a while. Even though they may seem insignificant on their own, they can rapidly add up, especially for apps with low traffic, and have a long-term impact on user experience. A solution that has already dealt with cold starts from its design and that also includes monitoring tools should help developers stay on top of them.

Also, you need to keep track of the number and types of errors that come up in your functions. Counting how many times functions are called could provide some business insights — or give an idea on where to improve the codebase.

When it comes to monitoring or observing vulnerabilities, the ideal platform should already include vulnerability scans (again: those are the kind of security checks the provider should offer). Website vulnerability scanners improve security and monitoring of serverless applications, as they detect potential vulnerability areas and help protect against attacks. If the platform is typesafe, meaning that the code won’t compile if it’s incurring in memory leaks, then monitoring will be a lot easier, since there’ll be fewer variables to check on.

Tools for serverless monitoring and observability

Serverless monitoring and observability use different specialized tools. Tools that incorporate metrics, logs, alarms, and traces help keep track of execution times, resources spent, and error rates.

End-to-end tracing, on the other hand, tracks a request as it moves through different functions in your app, and shows its process from start to finish. This helps detect bottlenecks bottlenecks and understand how functions and services depend on each other.

There are some other options for serverless observability to consider. For example, tools that offer synthetic monitoring to simulate user traffic can help catch performance issues before they affect real users. Real User Monitoring (RUM) captures data directly from user devices to share knowledge about the actual user experience. These are all add-ons and with a sound, proper serverless provider, most of these issues might not have to be dealt with. In the end, the serverless provider should offer a quick way to launch full-stack apps without caring about servers, cold starts, or downtime.

Platforms with built-in monitoring and observability tools

Several serverless platforms come with built-in monitoring and observability tools to help developers take care of their applications. These are the best serverless monitoring tools and the best providers that feature built-in tools:

Genezio

Genezio , a serverless platform for deploying full-stack apps, records the performance of its functions through audit logs and function log retention tools. Unlike traditional monitoring tools that require licenses or, seldom, old-fashioned software installation on on-prem servers, the serverless monitoring solutions that are part of platforms like Genezio work directly in the cloud environment. This means the platform gathers monitoring information and later sends it to a long-term storage system during invocation for debugging.

The agentless approach is better suited for serverless applications because these applications can scale up or down automatically based on demand, which makes it challenging to deploy, configure, and manage agents on each new instance in time. Genezio is also developing a website vulnerability scanner, which will add another layer of security and monitoring.

Genezio features a dashboard in which developers can check on their projects and visualize metrics. It’s also easy to add integrations to a project, so the platform supports third-party monitoring tools. This means you can even run a serverless monitoring stack for your serveless app. From the dashboard, you can also monitor your project and check logs for each deployed class.

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda, integrated with Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray , offers developers an extensive monitoring system. CloudWatch tracks function activity, memory usage, and overall performance. It also sets up automated alerts to catch any possible trouble ahead of time. AWS X-Ray offers request tracing, which allows developers to visualize the execution path of their applications. Taken as a whole, these tools help identify bottlenecks and debug distributed applications.

Microsoft Azure Functions

Microsoft Azure Functions comes with built-in monitoring tools through Azure Monitor and Application Insights . Azure Monitor gathers metrics and logs from every component, and gives a detailed picture of activity, availability, and system resilience. Application Insights focuses on function execution, and collects data that can be used to spot errors, or create automated alerts based on specific parameters. But a poor choice of settings could mean developers might have to deal with alarm fatigue. That’s why platforms like Azure are recommended for expert Azure users, not even for expert cloud users. A slight mistake could mean you’ll be facing alarms for just about everything — or that the invoice will be exorbitant.

Google Cloud Functions

Google Cloud Functions is packed with Google Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Trace . Cloud Monitoring collects detailed logs to keep an eye on function state and identify issues in near real-time. Cloud Trace maps out the flow of requests, and helps reveal any latency — cold start — issues. These tools are supported by Cloud Logging and Error Reporting .

Staying ahead of serverless monitoring and observability with Genezio

Serverless monitoring and observability should work exclusively for a businesses’ health. Metrics and logs should easily lead to any bottleneck that’s impacting a SaaS or enterprise tool. If the login screen is triggering a slowdown, then a good monitoring tool should point out to the developer that something must debug it.

Genezio, a typesafe serverless platform, handles monitoring as part of the package. It focuses on audit logs and function log retention and presents unambiguous data about function activity. Thanks to resources like these, developers can improve productive, modular apps on the fly (possible thanks to microservices or functions). Being typesafe means that Genezio won’t execute code that could mess the system’s memory up, and that’s a precautionary way of only deploying functions that won’t break when there’s massive demand for them.

Just as Genezio makes sure that serverless applications scale to meet traffic demands, it also makes sure that developers, solopreneurs, small business owners, and IT technicians have the necessary data to keep app performance in check.

To learn more about how Genezio can support your serverless applications through monitoring and observability, visit Genezio.com .