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Why is AWS EC2 Application Monitoring So Hard?

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Why is AWS EC2 Application Monitoring So Hard?

Why is AWS EC2 Application Monitoring So Hard?

Congratulations! You’ve migrated your core applications to the AWS cloud.  Or, you are developing new “cloud-native” applications and hosting them in the cloud.  Perhaps you are taking advantage of Amazon EC2’s scalability and its elastic architecture.  Either way, you now want to ensure that those applications stay up and running, or that you are alerted quickly if and when something happens.

Because something will happen.  Our customer data shows that companies using only three EC2 instances experience downtime at least once a month.  That means unhappy users unable to access their applications. You need a monitoring solution to tell you what’s going on.

How to narrow down EC2 application monitoring solutions

The first step in your search for the perfect EC2 monitoring solution should be to understand your requirements and your own technical capabilities.  Monitoring solutions are not all alike.

Are you interested in a feature-rich solution that monitors a wide array of systems?  Or one that focuses on a core set of systems, such as your EC2 environment?

What do you want to do with the output from your application monitoring solution?  Do you want as much information as possible to help your developers’ troubleshoot issues?  Or are you looking for quick alerts and assistance in remediating from any failures?

And what is your technical appetite to install and manage another application?  Do you love scripting?  Or do you want something that is “set-it-and-forget-it”?

A search for “application performance monitoring solutions” on Google returns 1,170,000,000 results!  Jump into the Amazon AWS Marketplace and you’ll find 453 products listed in the DevOps – Monitoring category.  Having a clear sense of your requirements and your own technical capabilities will help you narrow down your search.

Monitoring applications running on Amazon EC2 with Amazon CloudWatch or other APM solutions

If you are hosting your applications on Amazon EC2, then you might consider using Amazon CloudWatch.   How familiar are you with standard and custom metrics?  You should know that you need quite a lot of technical expertise to run Amazon CloudWatch properly. Amazon CloudWatch is a great solution for users who need data and actionable insights to respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resources and a unified view of their operational health.  But this all comes at a price in terms of the knowledge and experience needed to configure and manage Amazon CloudWatch properly.

Another choice is for you to evaluate and acquire one of the many commercially available application performance monitoring (“APM”) solutions on the market, such as from AppDynamics, Datadog, Dynatrace, or New Relic.  But keep in mind your requirements.  How broadly do you need to monitor?  And what do you intend to do with that information?  Are you ready to be overwhelmed with alerts?  And be aware that many APM solutions do nothing to help you recover beyond pinpointing the issue.  You still have to drop everything to manually restart services or reboot your instances.

Monitor applications running on Amazon EC2 using SIOS AppKeeper

But there is another way.  SIOS AppKeeper is a SaaS service that can be configured to automatically discover any EC2 instances and their services. It then automatically take any number of actions if and when downtime is experienced.  So instead of getting alerts that something is wrong, you get notified that something happened and was automatically addressed.
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SIOS AppKeeper starts at only US $40 per instance per month. We invite you to view this short video to see how easy it is to install and use AppKeeper.

Why is AWS EC2 Application Monitoring So Hard?

One of our customers, Hobby Japan, a publishing company in Tokyo, was initially using Amazon CloudWatch but their understaffed IT team couldn’t respond fast enough to alerts. They wanted to leverage automation and moved to SIOS AppKeeper.  Since moving to AppKeeper they haven’t experienced any issues or unexpected downtime with their EC2 instance. Here’s a link to a case study on Hobby Japan.

Monitoring your cloud applications shouldn’t be a full-time job.  You want a monitoring solution that is easy to install and use, doesn’t overwhelm you with alerts, and hopefully takes care of systems impairments automatically.  We encourage you to try a 14-day free trial of SIOS AppKeeper by signing up here.

Article reproduced with permission from SIOS

What is Amazon CloudWatch?

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What is Amazon CloudWatch

 

What is Amazon CloudWatch?

What you can do with CloudWatch and some hurdles to consider

With AWS boasting a dominant share of the cloud market, many companies are migrating their on-premises systems to the cloud with Amazon AWS.  So, how should a system running in the AWS environment be managed?

In this blog post, we will introduce the features of Amazon CloudWatch, a monitoring service provided by AWS, as well as the challenges of implementing it and how to solve them.

Using Amazon CloudWatch to closely monitor your AWS environment

To ensure that you have a stable cloud environment, it is important to detect anomalies (“system impairments”) quickly and respond in a timely manner.  Monitoring becomes an important and necessary task for any organization moving to the cloud.  This is no different than if you were managing on-premises applications and infrastructure. So, how should you monitor in an AWS environment?  One choice is to use Amazon CloudWatch, which monitors CPU, memory, and disk usage and notifies you when a predetermined threshold is exceeded.  Plus, you can set up your own metrics to monitor various items such as application logs.

The best part about Amazon CloudWatch is that it’s a service provided by AWS itself.  It has a high affinity with Amazon EC2 and other AWS services, so it can quickly respond to frequent functional extensions and specification changes, and can easily support AWS Auto Scaling, which automatically increases or decreases resources according to the load.  Amazon CloudWatch provides precise monitoring tailored to each environment’s unique circumstances.

Amazon CloudWatch implementation challenges

While Amazon CloudWatch is an ideal fit for organizations with experienced cloud engineers and DevOps teams, there are some things the average users should be aware of.

Amazon CloudWatch is effective for monitoring an organization’s AWS environment, but it requires a certain level of skill and knowledge to configure and deploy.  Especially when you set your own metrics, are setting up alerts, or taking into account Auto Scaling, the complexity increases. For example, If you’re setting up monitoring, it’s easy, but if you’re setting up email, rebooting, AutoScaling, etc., depending on the resource situation, it can be difficult.

If you want to automate the recovery process with instructions such as “restart the server when an error occurs”, you must first create a recovery scenario with an AWS Lambda script that provides a detailed description of the conditions and actions to be taken.  How familiar is your team with AWS Lambda?

The principal advantage of Amazon CloudWatch is that you can monitor your environment closely, but in order to do that, you must properly design in advance for each system what items to monitor and when, threshold values, etc.  These design tasks can take a lot of time.  Of course, your mission-critical systems need to be closely monitored in this way, but this level of detail and sophistication is not appropriate for all systems. For some, such as internal websites or WordPress servers, you will want to minimize your operating and labor costs. In such cases, we would like to suggest you consider a tool that can be more easily operated and managed.

SIOS AppKeeper for monitoring operating systems and application services running on AWS

For non-mission critical applications, we would like to recommend SIOS AppKeeper from SIOS Technology.  AppKeeper is easy to install and configure and monitors the services (processes) of the application running on the EC2 instances.  AppKeeper automatically restarts the service when an error is detected and reboots the instance if necessary.   Even users moving to the cloud for the first time can set up AppKeeper to monitor their EC2 instances and recover automatically, without needing to have sophisticated scripting skills.

With AppKeeper, there is no need to select individual services to be monitored. You simply start by selecting the EC2 instances to be monitored and what actions you would like to be taken automatically.  You can always get more specific about which services to monitor and how, but AppKeeper is designed to be easy to configure out of the box.  When an error is detected or automatically restored from, a log of the failure is recorded and stored so that the cause of the failure can be investigated later.

AWS EC2 Monitoring with AppKeeper

Rather than using Amazon CloudWatch to closely monitor everything in your AWS environment, we recommend that you take inventory of your environment based on your SLAs and recovery requirements, and use SIOS AppKeeper to monitor systems and applications where you want to reduce your operational overhead.

Stay tuned for a future blog post where we will go into greater detail comparing how to set up CloudWatch and AppKeeper to perform the same functions.

Learn more about SIOS AppKeeper

Sign up for a Free Trial of SIOS AppKeeper

 

Case Study: AWS EC2 Monitoring Solution relieved a global manufacturing company from stress as it moved to the cloud.

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Tokyo Diamond Tools Manufacturing Protects Important Applications with SIOS AppKeeper

Founded in 1932, Tokyo Diamond Tools Mfg. Co., Ltd. manufactures diamond tools for cutting, slicing, polishing, and drilling processes in a wide range of fields such as home electronics, semiconductors, electronic devices, healthcare and civil engineering. Although it is a long-established company with over 80 years of history, Tokyo Diamond has always been aggressively introducing new IT tools.  The company decided to move to Amazon AWS and virtualization for speed and efficiency of business improvements. SIOS AppKeeper played an important role in providing the application availability protection they needed. One of the reasons for Tokyo Diamond Tools’  move to the cloud and AWS was the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011.  Although there was no direct damage to the servers at the head office, equipment at the Sendai plant in the Miyagi Prefecture dropped out of the rack, causing serious damage.  Tokyo Diamond saw the need for a  better business continuity plan.  This was a primary driver for the shift to virtualizing their core systems and using cloud environments.

At first, the company started migrating relatively small applications to the cloud.  “We started the move around November 2011.  At that time, we had no choice but AWS,” said Mr. Takuji Kokubo, the head of IT Systems at Tokyo Diamond.  They managed operations themselves using Sony Network Communications’ “Managed Cloud with AWS” cloud portal.  Mr. Kokubo, is a self-described “One Man IT operation,” so efficiency and automation are important to enable the smooth operations of the company’s IT systems, at locations in Japan as well as in Singapore and Thailand.

Takuji Kokubo, Tokyo Diamond Tools
Mr. Takuji Kokubo,
Head of IT System
Tokyo Diamond Tools Mfg. Co., Ltd.

The move to the cloud and identifying the need for a recovery solution 

Diamond Tools implemented Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, a cloud storage service. They moved their groupware, sales support and video conferencing systems to AWS.  Diamond Tools’ video conferencing system is critical to their daily operations.  “It is a tool that is very frequently used in various conferences and meetings with overseas locations.  It is used about 100 times a month, and with the transition from a conventional pay-as-you-go SaaS system to AWS, we could reduce the cost as much as two million yen a year,” said Mr. Kokubo.  Previously, voice quality often dropped when too many users including other companies connected to the system at the same time.  Then Mr. Kokubo would receive a complaint from users but the problem could not be solved easily.  Building a company-specific video conferencing system on AWS has stabilized video and audio quality and reduced complaints.

Mr. Kokubo soon experienced issues with their EC2 environment. “EC2 is stable as an infrastructure; however, sometimes services on it fail. I was always worried, and one day, during an overseas business trip, I got a call saying that users could not access the system.  I had to open my laptop, which I carry all the time, to connect to AWS via VPN and recover the failed service,” said Mr. Kokubo.  Clearly this process was not scalable.

Service failures frequently occurred on the instance where the groupware application ran.  Most of the company employees use the groupware application every morning to check the calendar or book meeting rooms. “Many people would call me  to ask what was going on if they experienced issues,” said Mr. Kokubo. He learned the risks of taking care of the system by himself through this experience.

“Ten years ago, systems would stop when there was a failure, and users were used to that. Today, however, I get complaints as soon as anything stops. Now, systems are expected to be up and running all the time, like water that comes out of a tap anytime.  System downtime is becoming more and more unacceptable,” said Mr. Kokubo.

Mr. Kokubo always felt that he had to take care of any issue when one of the services running on EC2 failed.  Being the only person able to address any issues continued to be a burden for him.  Mr. Kokubo said, “Being a one man IT shop, I tend to consider that my value lies in only providing a help desk function.  But it’s not good – I needed to consider how I can make the systems of Tokyo Diamond work without my support.”

Because he was the only IT professional at a company that was relying more on cloud services, he knew he needed help. “When Sony Network Communications told me that SIOS AppKeeper provides automated operations and management of EC2 instances,  I decided to use it even before looking into the details. If we could have a solution that recovers EC2 services automatically, then I wouldn’t need to troubleshoot every issue by connecting to VPN on-the-go,” Mr. Kokubo added.

SIOS AppKeeper is a cloud service that monitors EC2 instances and restarts services automatically when it detects any system impairments.  When a monitored service fails SIOS AppKeeper recovers the service automatically without having to have personnel intervene manually.

More than 10 Applications Running on AWS

Tokyo Diamond has continued to migrate other applications to AWS, and by June 2018 had more than 10 applications running on AWS. “I feel that AWS is useful: the operating system starts in 10 minutes and resources can be scaled up/down flexibly depending on the business. We can even delete a resource even if it does not work.  However, the core system that processes a large volume of data was migrated to a virtual environment using a data center, not AWS.  We are using both AWS and a virtual data center to build a system depending on the usage and needs,” said Mr. Kokubo.

Tokyo Diamond currently monitors three critical applications that employees rely on with AppKeeper, including their groupware application, sales force automation and their video conferencing system.  Mr. Kokubo said, “First, we classified our applications and decided to start with three of them. It is worth paying a fee if I can be freed from the daily mental burden and get peace of mind during a business trip.”

SIOS AppKeeper Enables IT Personnel to Focus on Other Tasks

According to Mr. Kokubo, he no longer needs to think about the operations and management of the instances monitored by AppKeeper.  AppKeeper is working perfectly.  It has freed up his time to focus on the virtual machines and their other AWS applications.  Mr. Kokubo feels that AppKeeper brings him a sense of security about these core applications.

However, he does have a request for the SIOS Technology development team about AppKeeper.  “If there are no events, I’m worried about whether it’s working properly, or I may forget how to login. It would be better if it notified me frequently that it is working,” said Mr. Kokubo.  Automatic operations and management are the strength of SIOS AppKeeper; however, it can be invisible when nothing happens.

Having said that, Mr. Kokubo agrees that it is very beneficial that he is freed from having to troubleshoot these applications.  Now he can spend more time on management, including evolving Diamond Tool’s IT strategy and planning, security, and BCP initiatives.

Although today Diamond Tool uses SIOS AppKeeper for the operations and management of three applications, it plans to extend AppKeeper’s coverage to other applications soon.  This will enable Mr. Kokubo to spend much time on those value-added activities.  “Even if we try to hire system personnel, it is difficult because Japan’s workforce is shrinking.  In the future, I expect system tools to replace people using AI (Artificial Intelligence), and I hope SIOS AppKeeper also develops AI-like functions to automatically address high-impact failures,” said Mr. Kokubo, hoping for a day when further automation of operations management will be realized.

Learn more about SIOS AppKeeper

Sign up for a Free Trial of SIOS AppKeeper

 

 

Managing Alert-Stress for AWS EC2 with SIOS AppKeeper

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Managing Alert-Stress for AWS EC2 with SIOS AppKeeper

Managing Alert-Stress for AWS EC2 with SIOS AppKeeperHas this ever happened to you? You receive an alert about an application issue when you are out of the office, and you don’t have the information you need to address it? And you either need to access your cloud management console from an inconvenient location or pass the information on to another colleague to address? Or you are investigating an alert when another one comes in requiring your attention? Research has shown it can take the average person 23 minutes to recover from unexpected interruptions.

With companies moving to the cloud and having to manage more complex computing environments, this “alert stress” is starting to take a toll on workers’ productivity and mental health. Cloud monitoring solutions are trying to give you more information so you can resolve issues faster, but the depth of information they provide and the volume of alerts can be overwhelming.

Is Application Performance Management for AWS Enough?

Migrating to an AWS cloud infrastructure means that you often have to adopt new ways of managing and monitoring your applications. You can take advantage of AWS’s native cloud management functionality for your EC2 environment. But many companies quickly outgrow the functionality of these tools and deploy commercial Application Performance Management (APM) solutions for wider coverage and deeper insights.

But here’s the thing. These sophisticated APM solutions can be creating more work for you.  Yes, they often come with alert notification workflows to put the right information into the right person’s hands quickly.  But they do very little to fix the situation without manual intervention. The result: lots of stress-inducing alerts needing your immediate attention.

That’s why we created SIOS AppKeeper. It is the industry’s first out-of-the-box solution to automatically respond to service outages on Amazon EC2 instances. AppKeeper allows companies to protect applications from service interruptions and downtime while eliminating the need for costly and time-consuming manual intervention.

AppKeeper Automatically Restarts Failed Services in AWS EC2

SIOS AppKeeper not only identifies and sends notifications for failures. But it will also automatically attempt to restart failed services or reboot the instance if necessary. Our users have found that AppKeeper automatically addresses almost 85% of the application service failures that occur.  Without having to disrupt you, your I.T. or Development team or third-parties.

SIOS customers and partners in Japan have been using SIOS AppKeeper since 2017 to protect their AWS environments. ForgeVision is an AWS Advanced Consulting partner, integrates AppKeeper into its cloud management console. It has been allowing it to monitor and recover customers’ failures more cost-effectively. And AppKeeper is allowing Hobby Japan, a publishing company in Tokyo, to create a maintenance-free, low-cost environment.

We invite you to learn more about SIOS AppKeeper by watching this short video or by signing up to use AppKeeper for free until June 30th.

Then you can see for yourself what it’s like to have systems failures in AWS EC2 automatically addressed.

– Daisuke Yoshioka, Manager, Business Development for SIOS AppKeeper.

 

DataKeeper Cluster Edition for SQL Server High Availability In AWS Cloud

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The potential cost savings of moving to the cloud is nearly impossible not to consider. However, after you stop counting the money you are going to save, you start thinking about things like security and availability and wonder whether the cloud is for you. But fear not, we’ve got just the right solution – SIOS Datakeeper Cluster Edition.

In a traditional data center, you have the control and can deploy whatever security and high availability solution you like. However, once you decide to move your servers to the cloud your choices can become much more limited. It doesn’t matter whether you’re with Amazon, Google or Microsoft, outages in the cloud can and do occur and you need to do whatever you can to mitigate such risks.

Amazon Web Services

Let’s take a closer look at Amazon Web Services (AWS) for instance. What are the options you have to ensure that your SQL Server database can survive an unexpected outage? While some applications can be deployed in a load balanced configuration across multiple availability zones, SQL Server is generally not deployed in a load balanced configuration. What this means is that SQL Server itself resides in a single availability zone and if that zone should become unavailable, your whole application stack can come to a grinding halt.

SQL Server 2008 R2 and its limitations

If you read this article by Miles Ward, you will see that with SQL Server 2008 R2, your availability options are pretty limited. In that article on page 11, there is a nice chart that lays out your HA options. As you will see, the options are severely limited and mostly fall outside of the category which would be described as HA. Log shipping, mirroring and transactional replication are pretty much the only options you have, and they are more of a data protection options rather than HA options. If you want Microsoft failover clustering, you will find yourself out of luck due to some network limitations (clients can’t connect to a clustered IP address) in AWS and the lack of a shared disk resource required for traditional SQL clusters.

AWS

If you are looking to deploy SQL Server 2012, your options get a little better. As described by Jeremy Peschka, with a little manual intervention you can deploy AlwaysOn Availability Groups in AWS to do asynchronous replication from your data center to AWS, or even between AWS availability groups. Of course this assumes you have the SQL 2012 Enterprise license required for AlwaysOn Availability Groups. The only “issue” is that AWS really doesn’t support moving cluster IP address from one server to another, so client redirection has to be done manually using the ec2-unassign-private-ip-addresses and ec2-assign-private-ip-addresses commands after switchover that Peschka describes in his article. All-in-all this is a very manual process, which again does not really fit the description of a highly available system.

A Solution To The Limitations

If you can live without automated recovery and with the limitations of AlwaysOn Availability Groups that I described in a previous blog post, then you might just want to go ahead and try the AlwaysOn Availability Group deployment in AWS. However, if you are looking for an easier, more affordable, more robust HA solution, I have some really good news. SIOS Technology Corp has been looking at this problem and has developed a solution that overcomes all of the limitations previously described and will be available as an AMI for easy deployment. This solution is currently in private beta, but will be widely available later this year.

SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition

The SIOS solution is based on SQL server in a Microsoft Failover Clustering using DataKeeper Cluster Edition host based replication. By using hosted based replication they have overcome the first obstacle of clustering in EC2 – lack of shared storage. The second obstacle that SIOS had to overcome was the issue of client redirection described by Peschka; the client access point needs to be manipulated from within EC2, not failover clustering. SIOS has built intelligence into their AMI solution such that the reassigning of the IP address is automated as part of the cluster failover process, effectively simulating the behavior you would normally expect from a cluster.

And because all of this is built on top of failover clustering, this can be deployed using SQL 2008/2008 R2 or 2012. Even the Standard Edition of SQL Server will support a 2-node cluster so the cost savings vs. deploying SQL 2012 AlwaysOn Availability groups could be substantial.

Let me know what you think. Does SIOS Datakeeper Cluster Edition sound interesting? What are you doing today to ensure the availability of your SQL Server EC2 instances?

Reproduced with permission from https://clusteringformeremortals.com/2013/01/11/sql-server-high-availability-in-aws-cloud/