Monitoring Amazon Lambda with Slack

To integrate Amazon Lambda and Slack with your monitoring system, please reach out to MetricFire. Book a demo with the MetricFire team to discuss integrating Amazon Lambda and Slack and how that can support your monitoring system.

Amazon Lambda is a cloud-based, fully scalable service that lets you run code without managing or provisioning servers. Amazon Lambda will run your code when you need it and only charge you when you use it. You can run virtually any code for nearly all types of backend applications and services with no administration. Amazon looks after it all for you, including code monitoring and logging, capacity provision and scaling, and operating system and server maintenance.

You can use code that responds automatically to an Amazon DynamoDB table or Amazon's Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). You can also invoke code using API calls made using AWS SDKs or write code to respond to HTTP requests using Amazon API Gateway. Plus, you can write functions for serverless applications that you can automatically deploy using AWS CodeBuild and AWS CodePipeline. You can create backend services that take advantage of Amazon Web Services' inbuilt security, scale, and performance, plus use Amazon Lambda to extend other AWS services with custom logic.

More importantly, Amazon Lambda automatically monitors your code on your behalf and reports metrics through Amazon CloudWatch. Amazon Lambda automatically tracks the number of requests, the invocations per request, and the number of errors triggered by a request. 

With MetricFire, you can turbocharge your Amazon Lambda code monitoring services. By integrating Amazon CloudWatch with the MetricFire platform, you can display your Amazon Lambda metrics on aesthetically pleasing dashboards. MetricFire's advanced filtering lets you choose only the data views you want to see and discard the rest. You can also set up simple rules to discard data you no longer keep, plus you can receive alerts via email or Slack when your code is doing something it shouldn't.

To get started, first, create a policy that we will later attach to the user.

1.  In the IAM Dashboard, click on Policies (on the left) or Customer Managed Policies under IAM Resources, then click on Create Policy.
2. Switch to the JSON tab, replace the existing text with the policy provided below, and click ‘Review policy‘.
3. Give the policy a name (Eg: HG_policy) and a description (optional).
4. Save the policy by clicking ‘Create Policy‘.

Next, we’ll create a user to attach the policy. We’ll use the Access Key/Secret Key tokens to permit Hosted Graphite to import CloudWatch metric data.

1.  In the IAM Console, click on ‘Users‘ on the left or under IAM Resources. Then select ‘Add User‘.
2. Give the user a name (Eg: HG_addon) and ‘Programmatic access‘ for the Access type.
3. Click ‘Next: Permissions‘ and click the ‘Attach existing policies directly‘ button at the top.
4. Search for the policy we just created and attach it by clicking the corresponding checkbox, then press ‘Next: Review‘.
5. Click on ‘Create User‘ and copy the Access Key and Secret Key into the relevant fields on the add-on set-up page here. Optionally, you can download a copy of this account information, but keep it safe as this information can be sensitive.

Slack is a popular channel-based messaging platform that improves business communication and collaboration. This cloud-based solution offers enterprise-grade security and scalability, along with many innovative features that make it easier to have quality work conversations.

The core functionality of Slack revolves around chat rooms where users send messages and files. You can organize these rooms by topics, teams, projects, office locations, and other categories to keep the discussions highly relevant to that work. Users can also directly message each other. In addition to text messages, voice, screen sharing, and video chats are also supported.

You have a lot of flexibility in working with Slack. Your channels can be open to everyone in the organization, available for users outside of your organization, or made private for a subset of employees. A robust search function simplifies the process of looking up information, so it’s readily available. There is also an option of free-to-use and paid plans.

Slack workspaces create a central repository for work-related information, whether that’s being shared in messages, file attachments, links, or other formats. Slack performance monitoring allows you to see how your organization is utilizing this platform, whether it’s having issues, and ways to optimize it for your specific use cases.

One of Slack’s strengths is its integration support with many software types, allowing you to perform your work without leaving the workspace. For example, when you connect MetricFire and Slack, you can send immediate notifications to a specific channel so the right staff members see it. Since the alerts show up in a centralized communications tool being used for other daily work activities, they get noticed and acted on faster.

To integrate Amazon Lambda and Slack with your monitoring system, sign up for a free trial with MetricFire. Talk with the MetricFire team about how to integrate Amazon Lambda and Slack and get Amazon Lambda and Slack interacting with your MetricFire dashboards directly.

MetricFire is a full-scale platform that provides infrastructure, system, and application monitoring using a suite of open-source monitoring tools. We enable you to use Hosted Graphite and aesthetic custom dashboards to visualize your metrics so you can understand what is happening.

MetricFire offers users a complete ecosystem of end-to-end infrastructure monitoring, comprised of popular open-source monitoring software services: Graphite and popular dashboards. Plugins for many other open-source projects are preconfigured, such as StatsD, collectd, and Kubernetes. You get all these within a hosted environment as a single product. Not only does MetricFire fit well into the infrastructure monitoring use-case, such as network monitoring and server monitoring, but we also do application monitoring and business intelligence.

Through this hosted environment, MetricFire boosts the unique features of open-source projects to give you more functionality than the original products. Below are some of the MetricFire features at a glance: 

• Cloud Monitoring
  
  
• Hosted Graphite
  
  
• Dashboards

The key thing to remember is that Hosted Graphite by MetricFire is more than just Graphite. Our Hosted Graphite product actually adds data dimensionality and better data storage.

The benefits of MetricFire are:

• Simple, low-cost pricing
  A structured pricing model based on unique time series metrics allows you to work within your budget. The predictability and transparent pricing allow you to keep your costs in check and plan for the future. 1 metric is 1 metric.
  
  
  
• Easy-to-use dashboards
  Easily share your dashboards with clients for free.
  
  
  
• Responsive alerting
  Alert notification integrations PagerDuty, Slack, email, and webhooks.
  
  
  
• Freedom of customization
  Custom metrics through your code.
  
  
  
• Fantastic customer support
  Highly available support is provided by engineers for engineers to get you set up quickly.
  
  
  
• Enterprise-ready
  Dedicated clusters for users that need their own environment.