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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

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.
Why-App_monitoring-hard-2-1024x470

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