Top Serverless Monitoring Tools + Serverless Resources

Technology continues to evolve, and solutions for hosting applications continue to expand. One such method of application hosting that has been growing in popularity is serverless computing and, as a result, the increased demand for serverless monitoring.

What is Serverless Computing?

Serverless Computing is a cloud-computing execution model managed by cloud providers who run the servers hosting your application. Therefore, your cloud provider now takes care of it instead of you having to patch, secure and scale servers. Also, pricing for serverless computing is based on the number of resources consumed over time rather than set hardware capacity. AWS Lambda sums it up nicely: “Run code without thinking about servers. Pay only for the compute time you consume.” Some other major Serverless providers include Azure Functions, Google Cloud Serverless, Alibaba Function Compute, and IBM Cloud Functions.

The Challenge of Serverless Monitoring

In traditional application monitoring, you have dedicated resources (servers, databases, caches, etc.), while with serverless monitoring, your infrastructure consists of transient functions. With that, you also lose visibility and access to the underlying infrastructure running your code. These Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) environments are usually closed proprietary, which leaves us without any means to install monitoring agents for logging, tracing, analysis, etc.

Top Serverless Monitoring Tools

This challenge brings us to the Serverless Monitoring Tools, which specialize in addressing the challenges of serverless observability. The following list covers the top Serverless Monitoring Tools, followed by lists of platforms, open-source solutions, security, and other serverless resources.

Every few weeks, I will edit and add to this list of Top Serverless Monitoring Tools/Solutions. These tools represent the current recommended Serverless Monitoring Tools.

1. Datadog for Serverless: End-to-end visibility for modern applications

Aggregate critical serverless metrics in one place for a birds-eye view. Detect and resolve incidents spanning all of your service architecture, whether serverless functions, containers, or VMs. Collect custom business metrics from serverless functions without adding resource overhead to invocations. Address under provisioned or misconfigured serverless functions for performance and cost benefits.

Cost: Free 14-day trial or starts at $15/month.

2. Lumigo – Troubleshooting for Serverless Applications

Lumigo is building a serverless intelligence platform that helps developers understand and troubleshoot their serverless applications. The platform analyzes enormous amounts of data, learns the normal behavior of the serverless application, and produces live visual maps and insights that let developers identify and fix issues in their serverless applications even before they happen.

Cost: Free plan or from $99/month.

3. Site24x7 – Monitor AWS Lambda.

Measure key performance counters, including invocations, errors, duration, and throttles. Configure alarms to identify function latencies and code execution bottlenecks and debug function errors/crashes with log support.

Cost: Free trial or from $9/month.

4. Amazon CloudWatch

Monitor your applications that run on serverless or on-premises. CloudWatch collects data at every layer of the performance stack, including metrics and logs on intuitive dashboards.

Cost: Free trial or calculate.

5. Serverless Monitoring | New Relic

New Relic’s cloud-based platform does for your monitoring what serverless is doing for your development and operations processes. It’s easy to instrument all your resources and services in minutes, trace transactions from end to end, then start querying, analyzing, and receiving intelligent alerts for what’s happening throughout your environment.

Cost: Free trial or from $15 per million invocations.

6. Dashbird.io – Monitor serverless apps on AWS

Dashbird is an AWS Lambda monitoring & debugging platform that helps developers deliver bullet-proof and fast serverless applications by offering actionable insights and debugging features. It makes software and app development quicker, leaner, and helps to optimize costs. Dashbird uses Cloudwatch logs to provide in-depth analytics, and the 2-minute setup doesn’t require any code changes.

Cost: Free basic plan or from $115/month.

7. Rookout | Serverless Debugging and Logging

Rookout can then collect developer-defined information about the serverless code, allowing them to track issues even while the application lives in a serverless environment.

Cost: Free plan or from $75 per month.

Additional Serverless Monitoring Tools

OpenTelemetry – OpenTelemetry makes robust, portable telemetry a built-in feature of cloud-native software.
Lightstep – Simple Observability for Deep Systems.
Bluemedora – Monitor AWS Lambda in Google Stackdriver.
Stackdriver – Monitoring apps on Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services.
Appdynamics – AWS Lambda monitoring.
Dynatrace – AWS Lambda monitoring.
IO|Pipe (Acquired by New Relic) – serverless DevOps platform.

Serverless Development Resources

Cloudacademy – Serverless Training.
Serverless.com – The Serverless Application Framework powered by AWS Lambda, API Gateway, and more.
Slappforge – Serverless Development Platform + Built-in Monitoring Platform.
Stackery.io – Build, manage, & deliver production-grade serverless applications.
Twilio – Build and run apps with a fully managed, serverless environment.
Pulumi – Serverless In Just a Few Lines of Code.

Open-Source Serverless Tools

Open.iron.io – Open source serverless computing platform.
Kubeless – A Kubernetes-native serverless framework.
Fission – Open source, Kubernetes-native Serverless Framework.
Openfaas – Serverless Functions Made Simple for Docker and Kubernetes.
Fn Project – Open Source. Container-native. Serverless platform.
Openwhisk – open-source, distributed Serverless platform.
terraform.io – Deliver infrastructure as code with Terraform.

Serverless Security Solutions

Paloalto – Container and serverless security. Full lifecycle, full-stack security.
Protego.io – Serverless Security that is Fully Automated.
Twistlock – Securing VMs, containers, serverless functions, service meshes, or a mixture of all.
Snyk.io – Securing your serverless applications.
Aqua – Serverless Security for Serverless Containers and Functions.