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Automated recovery for Microsoft IIS Applications running on Amazon EC2

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Automated Recovery For Microsoft IIS Applications Running on Amazon EC2

A Better Choice For Reducing IIS Downtime

Microsoft’s IIS (Internet Information Services) is the fourth most popular web server in use today, with a 7.8% market share behind Apache, Nginx, and Cloudflare (source W3Techs.com, 8/12/20). And many IIS customers are running their IIS applications on Amazon EC2.

IIS is a versatile, extensible, and highly configurable web server. IIS includes some important functionality to ensure that applications are running properly, such as Application Pools and remote management capabilities to allow administrators to manage IIS remotely using PowerShell.

Deciding How To Monitor And Manage IIS Applications

When it comes to managing and monitoring IIS applications, customers have a number of options. They are either focused on improving the performance of applications running on IIS, or monitoring and addressing any failures.

Microsoft does include some native functionality to help you optimize and manage your applications running on IIS. If you and your team are very technical, then you may be comfortable using PowerShell or another scripting language to manage IIS Application Pools. Doing this allows you to automatically recycle your pools and virtual memory when certain time or request thresholds are met.

But this does not help you if your IIS applications experience a failure.  To monitor your IIS servers, you need to look to monitoring (“APM”) tools that can alert you to any failures and provide you with details about what failed.  These include commercial solutions such as from SolarWinds, AppDynamics, Dynatrace, Datadog, and New Relic.  How you decide between them depends on your requirements, the scope and sophistication of their features, and the user interface and the simplicity of the set-up process. APM solutions are great at alerting you when something goes wrong and why, but they don’t always help you get back up and running if your IIS servers are down.

A Better Choice For Reducing IIS Downtime

If you are looking for a solution that not only monitors your IIS servers running on Amazon EC2 but also eliminates downtime, then we encourage you to check out SIOS AppKeeper monitoring solutions. AppKeeper continuously monitors and automatically recovers applications, such as those running on IIS, if they experience service interruptions and downtime.

Let’s look at how AppKeeper EC2 monitoring solution helps reduce IIS downtime:

  • AppKeeper monitors your EC2 services and instances. Once you install and configure AppKeeper (which only takes about 10 minutes) you specify which Amazon EC2 instances and services it should monitor, and what actions should be taken if a systems impairment is experienced.
  • AppKeeper alerts you if any systems failures are detected with your IIS webservers.  You receive an alert by email or SMS and can see the details of the failure events and what actions were taken.

  • AppKeeper lauches automatic restarting services and rebooting instances if necessary upon the detection of system failures. You no longer have to respond to any alerts and troubleshoot what happened before restarting. AppKeeper does that automatically for you.

By going beyond simply managing IIS server performance or monitoring to automatic remediation, AppKeeper eliminates downtime and provides the peace of mind you deserve.

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.

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.
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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

 

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.