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About AWS Observability

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Learn about the features, benefits, and resources created by the AWS Observability solution.
Learn about the features, benefits, and resources created by the AWS Observability solution.

AWS provides over 150 discrete services including compute, network, storage, database, tooling, management, security, developer tools, and analytics to name a few.

Despite all of these services being a part of AWS, troubleshooting across different services can be problematic when you use separate AWS accounts to manage costs and give teams independent administrative control. Different AWS accounts often have different settings across Availability Zones or Regions, which makes it difficult to get a clear picture of overall application health.

See About the Observability Solution for additional information.

The Sumo Logic AWS Observability solution and Root Cause Explorer pull and analyze data across key AWS services and accounts, establish activity baselines, and determine causes for application incidents and high deviation events.

AWS Observability Solution 

The AWS Observability Solution can be deployed across multiple accounts and AWS Regions to:

  • Minimize the time it takes to get operational insights across your AWS infrastructure. 

  • Identify elements that are subject to specific operational issues across your AWS infrastructure.

  • Minimize the time it takes to assign operational to the correct business units and functional teams in your AWS infrastructure.

  • Expedite troubleshooting and root cause isolation for incidents in their apps and microservices running on AWS infrastructure using the Root Cause Explorer.

The unified platform collects and provides logs, metrics, traces, and metadata for the Application, Microservices, Cloud, Orchestrator, and Container layers. The solution understands how the different datasets and services are connected, and stitches those relationships into an entity workflow that makes it more intuitive for users to get a holistic view of their service.

Root Cause Explorer Edit section

The Root Cause Explorer is an add-on to the AWS Observability Solution and relies on AWS CloudWatch metrics to enable on-call staff, DevOps, and infrastructure engineers to expedite troubleshooting and root cause isolation for incidents in their apps and microservices running on AWS infrastructure. It helps you correlate unusual spikes which are referred to Events of Interest, in AWS CloudWatch metrics using the context including timeline, AWS account,  AWS region, AWS namespaces, resource identifiers, AWS tags, metric type, metric name and more associated with the incident.

Solution Availability 

Any Sumo Logic customer can leverage Sumo Logic AWS Observability solution features.

Root Cause Explorer is available for the following account plans:

Account Type

Account Level

Cloud Flex

Trial, Professional, and Enterprise

Credits

Trial, Essentials, Enterprise Operations, Enterprise Security, and  Enterprise Suite

System architecture and monitoring

Sumo Logic provides an AWS CloudFormation templates (CFN) and Terraform scripts that automate the setup and installation of the AWS Observability Solution for your AWS accounts and regions. 

  • Sumo Logic AWS Observability supports the following AWS services: EC2, ECS, RDS, ElastiCache, API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, Application ELB, and Network ELB.

  • Sumo Logic Root Cause Explorer analyzes and correlates metrics from all supported AWS Observability services and EBS, Autoscaling, X-ray, SNS, and SQS.

After you have prepared and deployed the solution, you can add and configure additional AWS services as your infrastructure grows.

AWS_Observ_architecture.jpg

Data Collection and Dashboards  Edit section

Sumo Logic collects logs, metrics, and events including AWS EC2 Host Metrics, CloudWatch logs and metrics, and CloudTrail logs. The collected data streams are enriched with the following metadata:

  • Account - This is an alias for your AWS account—for example, production, development, or stage—that you supply when you install the solution.

  • Namespace - This is the name of the AWS service and is automatically added by either the Host Metrics Source or the AWS Metadata (Tag) Source installed by the template, for example, aws/apigateway, aws/applicationelb, aws/ dynamodb, aws/lambda, aws/rds, and so on.

  • Region - This is the AWS region, for example, us-east-1, us-west-2, and so on.

  • Entity - This represents either the AWS resource name or id depending on the AWS service being monitored.

This new metadata can also be used in ad-hoc logs and metrics searches.

AWS_Observability_Collection-v2.png

You can navigate from overview dashboards of the infrastructure and drill down into account, AWS Region, service, or entity views. The intuitive navigation enables you to quickly resolve issues, minimize downtime, and improve system availability. See View AWS Observability Solution Dashboards for details.

Expand Namespace.png

Work with AWS account hierarchies Edit section Edit section

Amazon Web Services (AWS) are available to you through your AWS accounts that you can then use for billing and various aspects of your cloud infrastructure. AWS recommends that you use multiple AWS accounts to manage costs across business units and functional teams. In this way, you can provide different levels of administrative control over various AWS resources. 

In an AWS account, you can choose resources hosted in multiple locations worldwide. These locations are composed of AWS Regions and Availability Zones. Each AWS Region is a separate geographic area (for example, us-west-2 is in Oregon, USA) and has multiple, isolated locations known as Availability Zones. You can provision specified resources (such as databases and load balancers) across multiple Availability Zones, to ensure high availability and failover support.

Sumo Logic Apps for AWS Observability Edit section

The AWS Observability Solution provides an intuitive dashboard framework that mirrors industry-standard AWS hierarchies using a suite of Sumo Logic apps that provide insights into AWS operational and security services across an entire AWS infrastructure.

The following Sumo Logic AWS Observability Solution apps provide the ability to quickly isolate and solve problems with their specialized pre-configured dashboards:

  • AWS Observability API Gateway - The Amazon API Gateway service allows you to create RESTful APIs and WebSocket APIs for real-time two-way communication applications in containerized and serverless environments, as well as web applications.
    Sumo Logic's AWS Observability API Gateway dashboards provide insights into Amazon API Gateway tasks while accepting and processing concurrent API calls throughout your infrastructure, including traffic management, CORS support, authorization, and access control, throttling, monitoring, and API version management.
  • AWS Observability Application Load Balancer - The AWS Application Load Balancer service functions at the application layer, it receives requests, evaluates the listener rules in priority order to determine which rule to apply, and then selects a target from the target group.
    Sumo Logic's AWS Elastic Load Balancing ULM app is a unified logs and metrics App that gives you visibility into the health of your AWS Application Load Balancer and target groups. The app's preconfigured dashboards provide insights into latency, request and host status, threat intel, and HTTP backend codes by Availability Zone and target group.
  • AWS Observability EC2 Metrics - The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) service provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud, giving you complete control of your computing resources.
    Sumo Logic's AWS EC2 Metrics ULM app collects local host metrics and displays them using predefined search queries and dashboards. App dashboards provide a visual analysis of local host metrics for CPU, disk, memory, network, and TCP.
  • AWS Observability Lambda - The AWS Lambda service allows you to run code without the burden of provisioning or managing servers.
    Sumo Logic's AWS Observability Lambda is a unified log and metrics app for monitoring operation and performance trends in the AWS Lambda function in your account. The AWS app uses AWS Lambda Logs and Metrics from CloudWatch, as well as CloudTrail AWS Lambda Data Events. Preconfigured dashboards provide insights into executions, such as memory and duration usage by function versions or aliases, as well as performance metrics such as errors, throttles, invocations, and concurrent executions.
  • AWS Observability DynamoDB - The Amazon DynamoDB service is a fast and flexible NoSQL database service that provides consistent, single-digit millisecond latency at any scale.
    Sumo Logic's AWS Observability DynamoDB is a unified logs and metrics app that provides operational insights into your Amazon DynamoDB solution. The app provides preconfigured dashboards that allow you to monitor key metrics, and to view throttle events, errors, and latency, so you can plan the capacity of your Amazon DynamoDB.
  • AWS Observability RDS Metrics - The Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) allows you to easily set up, operate, and scale a relational database in your cloud infrastructure.
    Sumo Logic's AWS Observability RDS Metrics provides visibility into your Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) metrics collected from the CloudWatch metrics. Preconfigured dashboards allow you to monitor your Amazon RDS system's overview, CPU, memory, storage, network transmit and receive throughput, read and write operations, database connection count, disk queue depth, and more.
  • Amazon ECS Dashboards - The Amazon Elastic Container Service is a scalable, container management service that is used to manage containers in a cluster. With dashboards for Amazon ECS, you can monitor capacity and resource utilization of ECS components as well as quickly identify changes made to your clusters to help with troubleshooting. 
  • Amazon Elasticache: The Amazon ElastiCache allows you to set up, run, and scale popular open-source compatible in-memory data stores in the cloud. 
    The Amazon ElastiCache dashboards provide visibility into key event and performance analytics that enable proactive diagnosis and response to system and environment issues. Use the preconfigured dashboards for at-a-glance analysis of event status trends, locations, successes and failures, as well as system health and performance metrics. The dashboards also have additional performance insights for Redis clusters.
  • AWS Network Load Balancer - The AWS Network Load Balancer service is distributed in OSI Layer 4 (i.e., network) traffic (e.g., TCP, UDP, TLS) and can handle over a million requests per second. 
    The AWS Network Load Balancer dashboards provide insights to ensure that your network load-balancers are operating as expected, backend hosts are healthy and to quickly identify errors.

  • Global Intelligence for AWS CloudTrail DevOps - The Global Intelligence for AWS CloudTrail DevOps helps you accelerate root cause analysis for incidents by providing error rate and configuration insights benchmarked from Sumo Logic’s AWS customers for nine AWS services: EC2, Lambda, Auto Scaling, S3, ELB, RDS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache and Redshift. Benchmark dashboards are integrated with AWS Observability solution at the account and region level.

  • AWS Observability Classic Load Balancer - Unified logs and metrics app that provides visibility into the health of your AWS Classic Load Balancer. The preconfigured dashboards provide insights into latency, request and host status, threat intel, and HTTP backend codes by Availability Zones.