I would like to set a monthly threshold on the number of traces collected by AWS X-Ray (mainly to avoid unexpected expenses).
It seems that sampling rules enable us to limit the trace ingestion but they use one second window.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/xray/latest/devguide/xray-console-sampling.html
But setting a limit on the number of traces per seconds might cause me to loose some important traces. Basically the one second window seems unreasonably narrow and I would rather set the limits for a whole month.
Is there any way to achieve that?
If not, does anyone know the reason why AWS does not enable that?
(Update)
Answer by Lei Wang confirms that it is not possible and speculates about the possible reasons (see the post for details).
Interestingly log analytics workspaces in azure have this functionality so it should likely not be impossible to add something similar to AWS X-Ray.
XRay right now supports 2 basic sampling behaviors:
ratio
limit the sampled per second
These 2 can be used together in or relationship to become the 3rd behavior: ratio + reservoir. For example, 1/s reservoir + 5% ration. Means sample at least 1 trace / second, then if the throughput is over 1/second, sample additional 5%.
The reason XRay does not support more sampling behavior like you mentioned limit per month I guess because technically it is not easy to implement and not sure whether it is a common user requirement. Because XRay is not able to guarantee customer would not reboot application within 1 month. Even user say his application would never reboot. XRay SDK still need communication mechanism to calculate the total traces across fleet. So, the only possible workaround is user application keeps tracking how many traces have been in XRay backend in total by periodically query.
Related
we use event hub, the intent is to able to archive the inbound event data for troubleshooting/analytic reasons, understandably event hub capture built in plays the role, however looking at the price tag my boss not happy. His question is, what benifits it compares to we simply have a function to bridge the event hub to some sort of storage e.g. blob by ourself, would that justify the cost saving in long run..
I don't know how to answer this, could you please help?
Azure Functions consumption plan is billed mainly on number of executions whereas Event Hub capture is billed on number of TUs.
Here are couple things that can help to reduce Function app execution counts:
Smaller EH partitions counts - for example, 4 partitions would deliver events in larger batches than 32 partitions would do.
Increase batchSize in function app's config.
Since you have only 3 partitions and 1 TU traffic to process, you may probably save if you run with a function rather than capture. I recommend doing some test runs and see how many executions incurred then you can compare the hourly cost of functions app to $.10 hourly fixed cost of EH capture.
I am assuming storage side billing will probably be similar or you can even try reducing it further down by increasing batching and decreasing number of storage calls.
I am working on a massive distributive computing platform built within AWS Lambda. The platform is extremely spiky, so most of the time the number of ConcurrentExecutions is below 50, but we can hit maximum (1000 currently) for up to an hour or more if a large batch job hits the system (it is an event-driven system). This is a problem as we will have customer-facing APIs that will lag terribly. Finally, I am not an architect, so I have minimal control over how the system was designed, but I have been asked to devise a clever Concurrent Execution limiting solution
I'm not new to AWS, so I know about the standard ways to handle this problem. #1 is reserve concurrency on the user-facing lambdas. I'm not allowed to do that for the sake of this exercise (though I'll go tell my boss thats whats necessary if it truly is). I'm thinking of a system where we designate high-priority (for UI) and low priority functions (for batch processing), and the low-priority functions will check a stored (DynamoDB) value output from Cloudwatch on the current number of ConcurrentExecutions. If a low priority function finds that we are in danger of using all the ConcurrentExecutions, it will post to a queue with exponential backoff in place. This all should work, save the problem that ConcurrentExecutions are only monitored in one-minute increments, which is too slow, as many of our Lambdas run for around 500ms.
So my questions are as follows:
Is there a way to set up a custom ConcurrentExecutions metric that has second-by-second data points, and if so, how would you do it?
Is there a better way to implement a counter than Cloudwatch?
Am I just missing something here and someone has a clever way to manage Lambda ConcurrentExecutions
I don't think it's necessary to create a monitor or throttling solution at all. You will need to to build test and maintain something additional to your core solution. Instead, two suggestions:
Sounds like the current design has one lambda function doing too much. Decompose the Lambdas further, so you can split the Lambdas into a Ui/public lambda, and one or more dedicated to the batch processes. This way you can spread the concurrent execution limit across more Lambdas. The limit is per Lambda function.
Second, request a service quota/limit increase
To raise the limit above 1,000 concurrent function executions, submit a request to the AWS Support Center by following the steps in our documentation. This feature is available in all regions where Lambda is available.
See AWS Lambda Raises Default Concurrent Execution Limits.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/05/aws-lambda-raises-default-concurrent-execution-limit/
The limit management team is very flexible when asking for a limit to be raped they were generally raise it to any reasonable number that our solution requires.
To request a limit increase, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-resource-limits.html
I'm currently using ~500 concurrent executions and this tends to reach up to 5000 easily, is this a long term problem or is it relatively easy to make a quota increase request to AWS?
Getting quota increases is not difficult, but it’s also not instantaneous. In some cases the support person will ask for more information on why you need the increase (often to be sure you aren’t going too far afoul of best practices), which can slow things down. Different support levels have different response times too. So if you are concerned about it you should get ahead of it and get the increase before you think you’ll need it.
To request an increase:
In the AWS management console, select Service Quotes
Click AWS Lambda
Select Concurrent executions
Click Request quota increase
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,.
I've been using Copperegg for a while now and have generally been happy with it until lately, where I have had a few issues. It's being used to monitor a number of EC2 instances that must be up 24/7.
Last week I was getting phantom alerts that servers had gone down when they hadn't, which I can cope with, but also I didn't get an alert when I should have done. One server had high CPU for over 5 mins when the alert should be triggered after 1 minute. The Copperegg support weren't not all that helpful, merely agreeing that an alert should have been triggered.
The latter of those problems is unacceptable and if it were to happen again outside of working hours then serious problems will follow.
So, I'm looking for alternative services that will do that same job. I've looked at Datadog and New Relic, but both have a significant problem in that they will only alert me of a problem 5 minutes after it's occurred, rather than the 1 minute I can get with Copperegg.
What else is out there that can do the same job and will also integrate with Pager Duty?
tl;dr : Amazon CloudWatch will do what you want and probably much much more.
I believe that Amazon actually offers a service that would accomplish your goal - CloudWatch (pricing). I'm going to take your points one by one. Note that I haven't actually used it before, but the documentation is fairly clear.
One server had high CPU for over 5 mins when the alert should be triggered after 1 minute
It looks like CloudWatch can be configured to send an alert (which I'll get to) after one minute of a condition being met:
One can actually set conditions for many other metrics as well - this is what I see on one of my instances, and I think that detailed monitoring (I use free), might have even more:
What else is out there that can do the same job and will also integrate with Pager Duty?
I'm assuming you're talking about this. It turns out the Pager Duty has a helpful guide just for integrating CloudWatch. How nice!
Pricing
Here's the pricing page, as you would probably like to parse it instead of me telling you. I'll give a brief overview, though:
You don't want basic monitoring, as it only gives you metrics once per five minutes (which you've indicated is unacceptable.) Instead, you want detailed monitoring (once every minute).
For an EC2 instance, the price for detailed monitoring is $3.50 per instance per month. Additionally, every alarm you make is $0.10 per month. This is actually very cheap if compared to CopperEgg's pricing - $70/mo versus maybe $30 per month for 9 instances and copious amounts of alarms. In reality, you'll probably be paying more like $10/mo.
Pager Duty's tutorial suggests you use SNS, which is another cost. The good thing: it's dirt cheap. $0.60 per million notifications. If you ever get above a dollar in a year for SNS, you need to perform some serious reliability improvements on your servers.
Other shiny things!
You're not just limited to Amazon's pre-packaged metrics! You can actually send custom metrics (time it took to complete a cronjob, whatever) to Cloudwatch via a PUT request. Quite handy.
Submit Custom Metrics generated by your own applications (or by AWS resources not mentioned above) and have them monitored by Amazon CloudWatch. You can submit these metrics to Amazon CloudWatch via a simple Put API request.
(from here)
Conclusion
So all in all: CloudWatch is quite cheap, can do 1-minute frequency stats, and will integrate with Pager Duty.
tl;dr: Server Density will do what you want, on top of that it has web checks and custom metrics too.
In short Server Density is a monitoring tool that will monitor all the relevant server metrics. You can take a look at this page where it’s all described.
One server had high CPU for over 5 mins when the alert should be triggered after 1 minute
Server Density’s open source agent collects and posts the data to their server every minute and you can decide yourself when that alert should be triggered. In the alert below you can see that the alert will alert 1 person after 1 minute and then repeatedly alert every 5 minutes.
There is a lot of other metrics that you can alert on too.
What else is out there that can do the same job and will also integrate with Pager Duty?
Server Density also integrates with PagerDuty. The only thing you need to do is to generate an api key at PagerDuty and then provide that in the settings.
Just provide the API key in the settings and you can then in check pagerduty as one of the alert recipients.
Pricing
You can find the pricing page here. I’ll give you a brief overview of it. The pricing starts at $10 for one server plus one web check and then get’s cheaper per server the more servers you add.
Everything will be monitored once every minute and there is no fees added for the amount of alerts added or triggered, even if that is an SMS to your phone number. The cost is slightly more expensive than the Cloudwatch example, but the support is good. If you used copperegg before they have a migration tool too.
Other shiny things!
Server Density allows you to monitor all the things! Then only thing you need to do is to send us custom metrics which you can do with a plugin written by yourself or by someone else.
I have to say that the graphs that Server Density provides is somewhat akin to eye candy too. Most other monitoring solutions I’ve seen out there have quite dull dashboards.
Conclusion
It will do the job for you. Not as cheap as CloudWatch, but doesn’t lock you in into AWS. It’ll give you 1 minute frequency metrics and integrate with pagerduty + a lot more stuff.