Is there a way to visualize ongoing sessions/transaction on AWS QLDB? - amazon-web-services

I want to know if there is any metric related to QLDB where I could monitor the active ongoing sessions/transactions?

QLDB doesn't have an Active Query List view like some databases, due to its 30 second transaction limits and PartiQL limits. However, you can use CloudWatch, or some similar logging tool to understand Read and Write IOs, processing time, OccConflictExceptions, and SessionRateExceededExceptions to understand how to tune connections.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/qldb/latest/developerguide/monitoring-cloudwatch.html

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AWS Glue jobs status Dashboard

In our project total 10 Glue jobs are running daily. I would like to build a dashboard to show last 7 days jobs status it means either succeeded or failure. Tried to achieve it in CloudWatch with metrics, but not able do it. Please give an idea to build this dashboard.
Probably a little late for the original questioner, but maybe helpful for others.
We had a similar task in our project. We have many jobs and need to monitor success and failure. In our experience, the built-in metrics aren't really reliable, nor do they really answer the question of whether a job was successful or not.
But we found a good way for us by generating custom metrics in a generic way for all jobs. This also works for existing jobs afterwards without having to change the code.
I wrote an article about it: https://medium.com/#ettefette/metrics-for-aws-glue-jobs-as-you-know-them-from-lambda-functions-e5e1873c615c
We have set cloudwatch alerts based on these metrics and we use the metrics in our grafana dashboard to monitor the glue jobs.

AWS Lambda best practices for Real Time Tracking

We currently run an AWS Lambda function that primarily simply redirects the user to a different URL. The function is invoked via API-Gateway.
For tracking purposes, we would like to create a widget on our dashboard that provides real-time insights into how many redirects are performed each second. The creation of the widget itself is not the problem.
My main question currently is which AWS Services is best suited for telling our other services that an invocation took place. We plan to register the invocation in our database.
Some additional things:
low latency (< 5 seconds) in order to be real-time data
nearly no increased time wait for the user. We aim to redirect the user as fast as possible
Many thanks in advance!
Best Regards
Martin
I understand that your goal is to simply persist the information that an invocation happened somewhere with minimal impact on the response time of the Lambda.
For that purpose I'd probably use an SQS standard queue and just send a message to the queue that the invocation happened.
You can then have an asynchronous process (Lambda, Docker, EC2) process the messages from the queue and update your Dashboard.
Depending on the scalability requirements looking into Kinesis Data Analytics might also be worth it.
It's a fully managed streaming data solution and the analytics part allows you to do sliding window analyses using SQL on data in the Stream.
In that case you'd write the info that something happened to the stream, which also has a low latency.

Cron Jobs vs Task Scheduler table for scheduled emails

Preamble: I have a web app, the backend is based on the serverless architecture. It's basically an amplify app hosted on AWS with a dynamoDB database. I've learnt is possible to create a task scheduling system of sorts more here. A quick summary of the article is "Its possible to create a task scheduling table taking advantage of TTL and dynamoDB streams to execute lambda function at specific times. The TTL specifies a set time for an record to be deleted, we can capture this delete event in a dynamoDB stream and run some tasks based on information from the stream"
Problem:
The goal is to send a series of emails to users who sign up for our service. Each user that signs up gets a series of "Getting Started" emails. The first of the emails is sent 24 hours after a user signs up, the second 3 days later and the third exactly 7 days after sign up.
I see how a cron job would be suitable here, but it just seems a bit inefficient to me. I would basically have to search the users table for users whose sign up time falls between a specific 24 hour period and send the email to the users whereas with a Task scheduler table I could add a task to the table ( something like send first email to user300 with a TTL of when I want it to be sent ) and listen for delete events to run the task. No need to run a cron job daily, just a function that handles each task as it comes.
I think this is more like a performance vs storage problem. Having a task scheduler table would take up space, if we add all the emails to be sent to a user as tasks on the table (each email to be sent to a specific user is it's own task) each time a user signs up then I see the task scheduler table growing 3n records for every n user signed up. But this may not really be a problem as tasks are deleted after they are run. I do not know the performance cost of using a cron job for this particular task hence I'm here. I also may be wrong and the cost of running and updating this task scheduler table may be more than that of the cron job.
I initially thought of setting up a dummy user table and running both the cron and the task scheduler and documenting cost of running both, but you can imagine how much time and effort that would take.
So I guess my question is which is a more efficient solution in terms of performance and cost?
There is no perfect solution here. Keep in mind that Dynamodb TTL takes up to 48h to invoke, so it's probably unacceptable. CRON Jobs with Lambda are cheap, and it's easy to set. You coul also use SQS and populate it with daily CRON. Yan Cui wrote great article about this problem https://theburningmonk.com/2019/03/dynamodb-ttl-as-an-ad-hoc-scheduling-mechanism/
This may not exactly be an answer. Based on the medium article you linked the guy had a plausible reason why the TTL and dynamoDB streams would be better than a cron job which you reiterated. Setting up a cron job is easier and cheaper (free) and I doubt the performance will be that much worse unless the database is huge. I don't have any experience doing something like this so I wouldn't know how large the database would have to be for it to make sense to switch over. Alternatively, you can have as many cron jobs as you want so I don't see how you couldn't just set up a user specific cron job whenever someone signs up.
You can setup a CloudWatch Event to fire a Lambda function on a regular schedule. The Lambda function can search a database for an applicable result set and perform other actions - send an email, a text message, etc.
Here is an AWS tutorial that covers a very similar use case with step by step instructions. This tutorial is implemented by using the AWS Java API (but you can implement it using other supported programming languages).
https://github.com/awsdocs/aws-doc-sdk-examples/tree/master/javav2/usecases/creating_scheduled_events
From a Cost perspective - Lambda allows 1M free requests per month. Details are here - https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/

Mirror Marketo Data in S3 Bucket for Visualization

I am looking to get all of the Activity and Lead data in Marketo to be mirrored in an AWS S3 bucket so that I can build dashboards on it in Quicksight, so preferably I'd like to stream the data from Marketo into S3 in real-time, and then use Glue and Athena to connect the data to Quicksight. However, the only way to get large volumes of data out of Marketo appears to be their Bulk Extract tool (one for Leads, one for Activity data).
The problem is that these API interfaces make any attempt at near real-time streaming really clunky. Currently, I have Lambda functions being triggered every hour to pull the most recent hour of Lead/Activity data and saving it as a gzipped CSV in S3. But Marketo's Bulk Extract tool has a request queue and requests often take longer than 15 minutes to process (15 minutes being Lambda's max timeout length). So at least once a day my requests are getting dropped.
The solution seems to be to instead run this on an EC2 instance that can juggle multiple requests and patiently wait for Marketo's queue. But I'd rather not get into all the async and error-handling issues that that approach may entail if there is an easier way to accomplish this.
As an alternative solution, Amazon Appflow integrates with Marketo. But last I checked, it only works with Lead data, not Activity data. And there are restrictions on the filters you have to apply to the Lead data that make it clunky to work with anyway.
On Google I have found several companies that claim to offer seamless, reliable Marketo-to-S3 ETL, but I haven't yet researched their pricing or quality.
If anyone knows of a good approach to set up reliable and cost-efficient ETL between Marketo and S3 in a short period of time, I would very much appreciate it.
In a case like this, I would be tempted to recommend using an EC2 instance to run Singer with a Marketo input and CSV output, then set up something to move the CSV over to S3 as needed. That would be the absolute cheapest ETL solution, but this does suppose you have some comfort and familiarity with Python.
Also worth noting is that Stitch, Singers's paid product equivalent, supports native S3 export--you could always first test with a non-Marketo data source and see if that performs the way you'd like if you prefer money over time.

Is there an alternative way to know when DynamoDb table descreased?

I have a weird problem with one of my tables in DynamoDb. When I make a petition to describe it I find that it was decreased three times today, while in the AWS console I can see only one scale down, that coincides with the one returned by LastDecreaseDateTime when performing a describe_table(TableName="tableName") on boto3 library.
Is there any other way to check when were the other decresing actions executed?
Also, is it possible that DynamoDb is fooling me someway? I am a little bit lost with this, because all what I can see from the metrics tab in the console is that it was just decreased once. I have other tables configured exactly the same way and they work like a charm.
CloudTrail will record all UpdateTable api calls. Enable CloudTrail, then when this happens again you will be able to see all the api calls.
If you have scaled down multiple times with in 5 minutes you will not see that reflected in the Provisioned Capacity metrics since they have a 5 minute resolution,.