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SIOS AppKeeper now available in the AWS Marketplace

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SIOS AppKeeper now available in the AWS Marketplace

SIOS AppKeeper now available in the AWS Marketplace

Making it easier to add automated remediation to your DevOps environment.

Today we are excited to announce that our SIOS AppKeeper solution is now available on the AWS Marketplace, a digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors that make it easy to find, test, buy and deploy software that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Now it is easier than ever for end-users and AWS Partner Network (APN) members to try, acquire, and deploy SIOS AppKeeper to add automated remediation to their DevOps environments.  Click here to see AppKeeper in the AWS Marketplace.

SIOS AppKeeper continuously monitors and protects your applications running on Amazon EC2. We’ve been selling AppKeeper in Japan since 2017 and brought the SaaS service to the U.S. market earlier this year.  We created AppKeeper in response to the demand we were hearing from our customers who were moving to the cloud and were concerned about reducing potential downtime while struggling with limited resources. Click here if you would like to see a video on how easy it is to install and use AppKeeper.

SIOS AppKeeper now available in the AWS Marketplace

AWS EC2 Application Monitoring – SIOS AppKeeper | SIOS

How often are Amazon EC2 users experiencing downtime? According to our customer data, the average customer with only three Amazon EC2 instances experiences downtime at least once a month.  That could be due to software configuration mistakes, etc.

Going beyond application monitoring to offer automated remediation

Many AWS users are deploying application performance monitoring (APM) solutions, such as from AppDynamics, Datadog, Dynatrace or New Relic, to monitor their AWS environments.  But these only alert you to the fact that something happened, and why it happened. They don’t do anything to anything to reduce your downtime.

That’s where AppKeeper comes in. If AppKeeper detects downtime with any application services running on Amazon EC2 it automatically responds by restarting affected services and rebooting instances if necessary. AppKeeper addresses 85% of application service failures. Reducing the need for expensive outsourced monitoring or distractions for your IT team with automated recovery.  Learn more about APM automation from AppKeeper.

AWS customers who are already using an APM solution and want to extend the functionality to include automatic remediation, if and when Amazon EC2 downtime is detected, can take advantage of AppKeeper’s webhooks API to integrate with their chosen APM solution.

Why we decided to list SIOS AppKeeper to the AWS Marketplace

Here at SIOS Technology Corporation we have had a strategic partnership with Amazon AWS since 2014, primarily around our SIOS DataKeeper and SIOS LifeKeeper high-availability solutions.  SIOS Technology is an APN Advanced Partner today, and we share 100’s of joint customers.

Now that we have customer proofpoints for the effectiveness of SIOS AppKeeper (here are some recent case studies that you might enjoy), we wanted to make it easier for Amazon customers and APN partners to try, buy and use AppKeeper.  By many estimates there are over 200,000 active AWS customers using software from the AWS Marketplace, all of whom are taking advantage of how easy the AWS Marketplace makes it to discover, acquire and use complementary solutions as they continue on their cloud journeys.

And our friends at Amazon couldn’t have said it better:  “As our customers migrate more and more applications to the cloud, they are looking for flexibility in balancing the level of availability with costs across all of their applications,” said Chris Grusz, Director, AWS Marketplace, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “We’re delighted to welcome SIOS AppKeeper to AWS Marketplace and to provide our customers with more choice when performance changes occur.”

AWS customers who are interested in protecting their EC2 applications from unnecessary downtime can now quickly try out AppKeeper for themselves, and can acquire AppKeeper under their Amazon Enterprise Discount Plan, if they have one in place.  Pricing for SIOS AppKeeper starts at only US$40 per instance, per month.

Partners are now integrating AppKeeper into their customer solutions

A variety of partners are now integration AppKeeper into their customer solutions, and having AppKeeper available in the AWS Marketplace means it will be easier for APN members to evaluate if the solution is a fit for their business and their customers. Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are starting to include AppKeeper into how  they monitor and manage their customers’ AWS environments, as a way to reduce downtime and their own operational costs.  Other ISVs are integrating AppKeeper’s automated remediation functionality into their own cloud management solutions, and AWS Consulting Partners are packaging AppKeeper as they develop and deploy applications on AWS for their customers.

APN members who are interested in evaluating whether AppKeeper is a fit for their business should contact us by at email at d-yoshioka@us.sios.com.

We hope you will try out SIOS AppKeeper for yourself (we have a 14-day free trial and an easy installation process), and join the many customers who are now relaxing knowing that they have automated remediation in place to reduce any Amazon EC2 downtime that they might experience.

APM Automation – The Missing Ingredient For Application Performance Monitoring Solutions

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Application Performance Monitoring Solutions

 

APM Automation – The Missing Ingredient For Application Performance Monitoring Solutions

Companies that move to the cloud to host their applications understand that while they have outsourced the hosting of their applications to third-party cloud vendors such as Amazon Web Services, they still need to monitor and manage those applications themselves, usually with an Application Performance Monitoring solutions or APM. With yesterday’s client-server computing applications, I.T. departments had almost complete control over the servers, the networks, and the end-user computing environments.  But today’s cloud environments are more complex, with many more moving parts often outside of your control.

Some companies have embarked on digital transformations, pushing customer interactions into critical, web-based applications.  It is now more important than ever to quickly respond to any application performance and downtime issues via an APM automation solution.

How To Select An APM Solution

Many companies turn to Application Performance Management solutions such as those from AppDynamics, Datadog, Dynatrace, or New Relic.  An APM solution should identify any performance bottlenecks in your code, and help you fix those issues before your users are impacted.

Good APM solutions will let you know what happened, why, and how to prevent it from happening in the future.  An APM solution will alert you when the application or systems being monitored meets a certain condition (load, response times, etc.).  Once you receive an alert you should be able to identify why the application is not performing properly.  Armed with this information you can provide your development team with very detailed diagnostics that will allow them to address the issue and prevent them from happening in the future.

But how do you select the right Application Performance Monitoring solutions solution?  A quick search on Google for “cloud APM solutions” returns 5,830,000 results!  That can be overwhelming to anyone unfamiliar with the space.  Thankfully another Google search will also provide you with a lot of advice and resources on how to select an APM solution that is right for you.  You should look for third-party, non-vendor advice to help you frame your requirements and develop a short-list of choices that meet those requirements.  Gartner has been watching this category for a while and publishes its APM Magic Quadrant every year.  It is a good resource when it comes to understanding how to evaluate Application Performance Monitoring solutions solutions and give a good overview of the top vendors.

Add APM automated to your remediation requirements list

Here at SIOS Technology Corporation, we are always working with customers who are migrating their applications to the cloud.  They often want to know how to protect their applications from unnecessary downtime and ask us for our advice.  The choice of how to protect their applications is a function of the criticality of those applications (more critical applications often require failover solutions, etc.).  But we also help them understand why their applications might be vulnerable.

It used to be that backup and data protection was a separate function (one that was needed only if the APM solution identified downtime).  But in today’s complex cloud environments we believe that organizations should look for a holistic approach when it comes to monitoring and managing their critical applications.  If a traditional APM solution identifies when something happens and lets you diagnose why it happened, then why doesn’t it prevent unnecessary downtime where possible?

We believe that automation is the missing ingredient from most cloud APM solutions.  Many of our customers tell us how they are being overwhelmed by receiving too many alerts from their APM solutions, each requiring them to stop and understand what happened and why.  They quickly understand what to ignore and what to pay attention to (and good APM solutions help them do this through machine learning).  And if and when their applications go down, the APM solution alerts them to the downtime and diagnoses why to help prevent it from happening again.  But the APM solution won’t reduce their immediate downtime.

That’s where SIOS AppKeeper comes in. AppKeeper monitors a customer’s applications running on Amazon EC2 and automatically restarts the services on EC2 or even reboots EC2 instances if and when downtime is detected.  Our average customer, with only 3 Amazon EC2 instances, experiences downtime at least once a month.  That is downtime when critical, often customer-facing, applications are unavailable, and when I.T. teams are having to drop everything and respond.

AppKeeper’s APM automation solution is letting customers automatically recover from over 85% of their Amazon EC2 downtime situations.  Here’s a link to a quick video if you would like to see AppKeeper in action.

Through AppKeeper’s API customers are programmatically extending the value of their APM solutions by having alerts from their APM solutions trigger AppKeeper to automatically restart effected Amazon EC2 services or reboot instances if necessary.

Application Performance Management solutions

Application Performance Monitoring and Automated Remediation.  Better than peanut butter and jelly?

In many cases, AppKeeper customers have easy to manage Amazon EC2 environments, with perhaps less than 8 Amazon EC2 instances.  For them, the native monitoring and automated remediation functionality of AppKeeper are enough to let them sleep soundly at night, knowing that they are proactively reducing downtime if and when it occurs.

But we recognize that many customers have more sophisticated cloud environments, and have already invested in APM solutions, such as those from New Relic, Datadog, Dynatrace, LogicMonitor, or Zabbix.  They have come to expect immediate alerts and the rich set of data to help them diagnose what happened and why.  For this set of customers, we think the addition of AppKeeper’s automated remediation functionality to their APM toolkit gives them the best of both worlds: control over the performance of their applications, and reduced downtime.

Over the course of the next few months, SIOS Technology will be working with several leading APM vendors to provide packaged and certified integration between their APM solutions and AppKeeper.  Using these integrations with AppKeeper, these users will now enjoy a closed-loop system, where they will be alerted to detected Amazon EC2 downtime and the remediation action that AppKeeper took.

So stay tuned for some exciting news.  Meanwhile, if you would like to try SIOS AppKeeper for yourself, please feel free to sign up for a free 14-day trial of AppKeeper. AppKeeper starts at only US$40 per instance per month.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Six Reasons Not to Buy SIOS High Availability Software . . . If You Dare

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Six Reasons Not to Buy SIOS High Availability Software . . . If You Dare

You need SIOS Protection Suite (for Linux or Windows) or SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition for high availability protection for business critical applications.

UNLESS

1. You prefer free solutions only.

I get it. There are definitely times when I do the same thing when I need to learn a new skill, get a quick tip, drop a few pounds, or set up a quick demo. Rather than signing up for a subscription, purchasing a license, or investing in a combination of the two, I have gone the free route.

However, the saying often holds true, you get what you pay for. Free trials are fine. Permanently free high availability is like gas station sushi – is the risk really worth it? Be sure that free doesn’t prevent you from utilizing the fullness available for optimizing uptime and increasing availability. Make sure you aren’t passing over a reasonably priced high availability solution that is proven to protect your mission-critical applications.

2. Being a single solution shop solution is more important than meeting your HA needs.

We were a “Ford tough” family for decades. Seriously. I understand what it is like to be a one solution shop. My dad owned a Ford truck for work, a Ford Mustang for leisure, a Ford 3600 tractor for the farm, and a Ford minivan for family travel. There was even a season where we received model toy cars with the brandished blue oval as well.

But, when my wife and I were branching out on our own family needs, we broke away from the single solution to address needs that fell out of the Ford wheelhouse (at the time). You may be a single shop buyer, but if your needs have changed and the HA provider or solution hasn’t kept up, consider whether expanding the solution set will eliminate risks, improve success, or be worth the investment in a complementary solution for those new needs. When we needed a reliable, gas efficient, sleek, family friendly, and economical solution for our family, we supplemented Ford tough with a Honda Odyssey. If you are a single stop shop, and you are not worried about vendor lock-in best of luck.

3. You are more of a do it yourself-er coder.

You like coding. You like to write a lot of scripts, and don’t mind pulling out your bash, ksh, perl, python, powershell, batch or command tool kit and wiring things up yourself. You value the joy in flexibility and adding your own tweaks.

I love writing code as well, but there are times when the last thing I want to do is spend time writing a lot of code and scripts for a problem that is solved, proven, and off the shelf ready. For the do-it-yourself admin, off-the-shelf may not be your preference, but consider whether 20 years of expertise and experience should be rehashed and re-architected for your enterprise. But, if you have to get the code writing fix in, High Availability Software SIOS provides the Generic Application Recovery Kit for you to get in a coding fix.

4. You need Ubuntu support (or Solaris).

Your environment is unique. You have customers who’ve cut their teeth on Solaris and are hanging on to it for dear life. Or you’ve got those who have fully embraced the Linux realm and have moved to Ubuntu. In either case, you look at the SIOS products matrix and Ubuntu isn’t currently a match for your SIOS version. Bummer!

While this is true, consider the rich and vast features and flavors of support that are still available. While there are parts of your enterprise that have dug in on Solaris and others that have raced to embrace Ubuntu and newer variants of Linux, it is more likely that you need a solution capable of supporting RHEL, OEL, SuSE, CentOS and possibly Windows as well. Be sure not to single out a high availability solution by what it doesn’t provide and consider the depth of what it does.

5. You don’t run a hybrid of anything in your environment.

I heard it in the middle of a movie last week. The lead character commented on the idea of moving forward with some new idea of an overly excited owner. The classic line: “Sometimes the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.” In your mind you feel that you aren’t running a hybrid environment. Your applications are critical, but not complex. The moving parts are simple- a database, front end and a supporting application. It makes sense that you might not want to “complicate” things with additional processes, products, solutions or services, and you may feel like the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

Before you make that final decision for a High Availability Software, assess whether a non-hybrid environment is the same as a simple environment. Consider whether or not the moving parts are as simple as you imagine or whether a solution with failover orchestration would be beneficial to reducing your overall RTO and increasing your RPO.

6. Endorsements from HA experts and experience don’t matter.

I bought a set of headphones online in mid-April. As I suspected, I discovered that anyone can do bluetooth headphones. But, not everyone can do them well. Ergonomically, the “new to market” headphones are a nightmare. Pairing was a breeze, but accidental unpairing is a constant battle. The sound quality is amazing, but that amplifies my annoyance when the headphones randomly chirp – loudly and clearly – for system sounds or at the end of a song.

You may believe that high availability and application monitoring can be done by anyone and that experience doesn’t matter. However, consider your own experiences and mine and ask if you’d really want to trust your enterprise environment to a group that just started thinking about the complexities of hybrid environments, or the dependencies and application-centric knowledge needed for the applications you use most frequently.

When deciding the right High Availability Software for your environment, consider carefully whether you want to go without the many best in class features, hardened and tested solutions, knowledgeable experts, broad swath of supported applications and environments, and industry leading experience and decades of insight. Then after careful consideration, choose wisely.

-Cassius Rhue, Vice President, Customer Experience, SIOS

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Reducing downtime for WordPress sites hosted on Amazon EC2

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Reducing downtime for WordPress sites hosted on Amazon EC2

Going from ignorance to bliss with SIOS AppKeeper

WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS) used by millions of companies to create websites, blogs, or apps.  According to estimates, there are over 75 million websites today that use WordPress and many companies are beginning to host their WordPress instances on Amazon EC2. Users love WordPress for its flexibility and the ease with which you can create and modify layouts.  If you are using WordPress for your website, then you are in good company.

With so many users relying on WordPress to power their websites, you can imagine that there is a rich set of third-party tools (plugins and services) designed to meet the needs of those users.  Some of these plugins are to add security functionality, such as scanners to probe for vulnerabilities.  Because more plugins can lead to more vulnerabilities.

Trust, but verify.  Why monitoring WordPress uptime matters.

Deploying a website or application running on WordPress without monitoring it properly would be like leaving your car running outside with the keys in it.  You’ll want to protect your investment.  For companies managing WordPress sites (or any applications, for that matter), there are three primary reasons to monitor:

  1. To understand the visitors and optimize their experience;
  2. To monitor the speed of the site and ensure that it meets expected service level agreements (SLAs); and
  3. To ensure that you maximize uptime.  Downtime can mean (serious) lost revenue for any e-commerce sites running on WordPress.

You believe your WordPress site is working properly, but you really want to know what is going on.  The goal of monitoring should be to know quickly what is going on and why, allowing you to respond quickly to any issues.

There is a wide range of tools available to help WordPress users monitor their sites.  Some are very focused on WordPress, such as ManageWP and JetPack, while others are industry-standard solutions that apply to many different CMSs and applications.  Some go “deep” and are focused on one element of monitoring, such as Google Analytics and its focus on visitor analytics, while others try to go “broad” and address all three key aspects of monitoring.  What you decide to use depends on your budget, your requirements, and your technical capabilities.

Here at SIOS, we believe that the best of breed approach makes sense.  We focus on monitoring applications and ensuring that our customers’ experience as little downtime as possible with those applications.  Many of our customers are using SIOS AppKeeper today to monitor and protect their WordPress sites running on Amazon EC2.

SIOS AppKeeper – simple but powerful monitoring and automated remediation for WordPress sites

Many WordPress monitoring solutions (from free plugins to low-cost freemium services) will tell you when your WordPress site is down.  And depending on the sophistication (and cost) of your monitoring solution, it may tell you why your WordPress site is down.  But will it help you reduce downtime and automatically restart your services or reboot your instances when downtime is experienced?

Many companies host their WordPress sites on Amazon EC2 using either Apache or NGINX webservers.  SIOS AppKeeper is a SaaS service that can be configured to automatically discover WordPress sites or applications running on Amazon EC2 instances and their services, and then automatically take any number of actions if and when downtime is experienced.  So instead of only getting alerts that something is wrong, you get notified that something happened and was automatically addressed.

Downtime matters.  If you are running an e-commerce site using WordPress, then downtime will result in lost revenue.  How much revenue?  Simply divide your annual revenues by 365 days and 24 hours (Annual revenue/365/24) to understand your revenue per hour.  In 2013 Google experienced a 5-minute outage that cost them $545,000 in revenue. Now, you may not be Google, but you certainly do want to eliminate downtime wherever possible.

Now imagine what happens when you receive an alert that your WordPress site is down.  Are you ready to respond immediately?  Do you know what should be addressed to get your WordPress site back up and running?  According to our customer research, the average customer using only three Amazon EC2 instances experiences downtime at least once a month.

SIOS AppKeeper monitors Amazon EC2 and alerts you to any downtime AND takes action to remediate the situation, by either restarting your Amazon EC2 services or rebooting your instances.

AppKeeper addresses over 85% of our customers’ Amazon EC2 downtime issues automatically.  This means that you get notified that a failure was identified and addressed, without you having to drop everything or lose any significant revenue.

Today hundreds of companies rely on AppKeeper to keep their cloud environments running. We invite you to check out the video below see how easy it is to install and use AppKeeper.

Video: Installing AppKeeper and recovering from AWS EC2 failures Demo

And if you like what you see, please feel free to sign up for a free 14-day trial of AppKeeper. AppKeeper starts at only US$40 per instance per month.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Migrating to the cloud? Here’s how your DevOps priorities should change when you move to Amazon EC2

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Migrating to the cloud? Here’s how your DevOps priorities should change when you move to Amazon EC2

A majority of companies migrating to the cloud, or creating “cloud-native” applications, are doing so with Amazon Web Services (AWS).  AWS offers a lot of cost and functionality advantages.  Companies who have adopted industry-standard developer operations (“DevOps”) best practices for monitoring and managing their on-premise environments often ask themselves how they adapt to their new cloud environments and applications.

How will DevOps priorities change when you move from on-premise applications to Amazon EC2?  Here’s an explanation of the differences between the two and what you should keep in mind.

DevOps priorities in the cloud?  The same. But different.

We often hear customers say that operations will be easier when they move to AWS. We caution them that moving to the cloud (or even AWS) does not mean that they no longer need to monitor and manage their applications.

Companies moving to Amazon AWS can take advantage of lower costs and manpower resources when it comes to hardware procurement, provisioning, and maintenance.  But you need to take into account that when you decide to host applications on Amazon EC2 that anything above the Operating System layer is your responsibility.

When it comes to backup/availability guarantee/security measures, etc. for your Amazon EC2 environments, the priorities are the same as if they were on-premise applications. And Amazon provides some native tools and functionality.  But you need to decide if they are the right fit for requirements.

Security, Backup… What do you need to know when managing Amazon AWS environments?

So what are some of the AWS-specific considerations you need to keep in mind as you move to Amazon EC2?  And what are the right tools for you?  The time you invest upfront in designing your applications and how you will deploy and manage them will pay off.

Your first consideration should be how you will secure your Amazon EC2 applications.  Network design, such as “which ports to open” and “from where to allow access” must be considered in the same way as for your on-premise applications.  These can be configured in AWS using security groups and network ACLs (access control lists).

You can use the AWS Trusted Advisor functionality*, which automatically examines your AWS environment and points out whether or not it is set to the recommended settings, making it possible to check your company’s AWS environment for security issues.  We recommend checking with the AWS Trusted Advisor both at the time of implementation and periodically.

Another essential aspect of security is the management of authentication and access privileges.  AWS consolidates all of these into AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM).  In addition to controlling who can access which EC2 instances, you can also use AWS IAM to set up access permissions from EC2 instances to other resources (such as DBs), etc.  Once you have migrated to AWS, the first thing you need to do is to set up the accounts and access restrictions properly in AWS IAM.

The next consideration is “how will I backup my applications on Amazon EC2?”  Amazon EC2 provides the ability to take snapshots, which allows you to do so.  In addition, using “Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager” makes it easy to set up periodic snapshots, as well as incremental backups.  Snapshot files are stored on the Amazon S3 storage service.  You are charged according to their capacity, so you need to be aware of the amount of data you have and set up such settings as “reduce the capacity by incremental backups” and “delete from old data.”

“Availability” needs to be considered in advance. The key is to operate the system in accordance with the priority level of the system.

The last consideration is availability.  With Amazon EC2 applications, as well as those that are on-premise, you should consider the level of availability required based on cost and system importance. However, if you use Amazon’s Multi-AZ deployment functionality, you can specify a redundant configuration between different data centers.  However, using Multi-AZ costs more than using a single-AZ configuration (although not as much as if you had redundant on-premise systems).  When designing your applications you need to consider whether Multi-AZ is required and how much you should invest in availability.

If you aren’t investing in failover, then you should at least be monitoring your applications and planning how to recover them when downtime is experienced.  You can use Amazon CloudWatch to easily monitor general items such as CPU, memory, and disks, and you can also program the Amazon EC2 Auto Recovery function to automatically recover instances when an error occurs in the EC2.

If your application is mission-critical, then you will want to invest more in its availability.  You should consider many of the excellent third-party solutions that offer valuable functionality to the AWS community.  One choice is SIOS AppKeeper, an easy to configure and use solution that monitors your Amazon EC2 instances and automatically restarts services or reboots instances if they experience system failures.  Here’s a quick video of how AppKeeper works

While moving to the cloud for your applications makes a lot of sense, you cannot abandon DevOps best practices.  Amazon AWS provides you with a rich set of functionalities and tools, but you still need to take primary responsibility for the security, backup and availability of your applications.  How you do this depends on your skills and the importance of the applications themselves.

We invite you to join the hundreds of customers who have been taking advantage of AppKeeper to reduce their Amazon EC2 downtime by signing up for a free 14-day trial of the service.

* Note:  To use AWS Trusted Advisor, a contract for business support or higher is required.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS