As more and more applications move to the cloud, the complexity of application architectures inevitably increases. It is a burden we willingly take on because the benefits—flexible deployment, technology diversity, independent scaling, and much more— tend to far outweigh the costs. But along this transition, most organizations face a dilemma, to divert resources to the necessary tooling for effective AWS monitoring and troubleshooting of these systems – i.e. observability – or slow the rate of migration to the cloud.
The first option hampers DevOps teams as they manage an ailing part-monolith part-cloud architecture and the second slows down your business, since the agility and performance of the cloud is necessary to remain competitive. Luckily, there is a third choice — an end-to-end observability solution. One that automatically collects telemetry from newly commissioned services, organizes that data rolling up the most important bits and surfaces out of the ordinary behavior enabling speedy issue resolution and a reliable service.
This is why we are excited to introduce the Continuous Intelligence Platform for AWS Observability — the first solution to leverage all of the telemetry generated by AWS services to accelerate issue resolution, improve AWS threat detection, automatically determine the root cause of failures, and help customers optimize usage of AWS services to improve uptime and performance. Let’s take a look at some of the product details.
Unified contextual visibility with AWS Observability
Sumo Logic’s AWS Observability provides a single-pane-of-glass for your key AWS services. As data flows into Sumo Logic your architectural hierarchy of AWS accounts, regions, services, and entities is automatically populated making it easy to get high-level account visibility or drill down into service-specific overviews. Each dashboard has been meticulously designed to surface the most important log and metric data for the service you are looking at. Click on your AWS API Gateway service to get a snapshot of API calls today vs yesterday and last week, or click into EC2 to get an overview of instances with high memory or CPU utilization. The AWS Observability solution is context-rich, allowing you to pivot from a suspicious metric to the related logs — all powered by Sumo Logic’s world-class log search backend.
Seamless setup and automated collection
Sumo Logic automates the collection of AWS telemetry including AWS services added after setup. Using AWS Cloud Formation, the collection is configured to pull CloudWatch logs and metrics, and CloudTrail logs into Sumo Logic. When data reaches Sumo Logic, it is enriched with value metadata enabling intuitive hierarchical navigation and seamless pivots from metrics to related log data and vice versa. The Sumo Logic explore tab is automatically populated as data comes in and stays up to date if there are any architectural or application changes.
Root Cause Explorer
Observability for AWS is not just about being able to see everything that is happening in the environment but also about being able to understand why something is happening. The challenge in typical AWS environments lies in the difficulty of correlating data and determining the cause and effect relationship of issues across different services. Sumo Logic’s Root Cause Explorer was designed for this purpose, automatically correlating data across affected AWS services and providing a cause and effect relationship that helps determine the underlying root cause of issues affecting application availability & performance.
The Root Cause Explorer is powered by machine learning and a decade of industry knowledge to cut down on noise and surface high anomaly events of interest. Anomalous events of interest across all of our services (ELB, EC2, Lambda, for example) are plotted together, with time on the x-axis, and the y-axis displaying the deviation of an event from the baseline. By first establishing a resource-specific baseline for what a normal day or week of CloudWatch metrics might look like, Sumo Logic can highlight out of ordinary events.
Sumo Logic: Continuous Intelligence For AWS Observability
We are excited to introduce an Observability solution tailor-made for AWS specific needs and use cases. Our solution provides high-level visibility to understand overall services and application health and performance alongside the capability to drill down into specific services and instances, all in just a few clicks. The Root Cause Explorer is powered by machine learning to surface critical signals for accelerated troubleshooting and issue resolution. Check out the details about our AWS Observability Solution and Root Cause Explorer, watch a demo, and sign up for a 30-day trial.
