Cloud

How to Monitor and Troubleshoot Serverless Applications

Solving serverless application problems can be a tricky challenge. Here are four steps to resolve it, including identifying cold start issues.

Alex Williams

Alex Williams is a full-stack developer and technology writer in the United Kingdom specializing in web development and data management.

Cold start issues are a common problem facing serverless applications, where the first execution of code is delayed because the function environment is still initializing.

Monitoring and troubleshooting serverless applications present plenty of unique challenges for developers, so it’s essential to employ best practices to maintain application uptime. Fortunately, the big cloud platform providers all offer native application monitoring tools that can help identify issues.

Take these four steps to keep your serverless applications running smoothly.

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1. Monitor the Duration of Function Execution Times

It’s crucial to record and monitor the duration of function execution times, as this data will provide valuable insight into any potential bottlenecks or performance issues within serverless apps.

Tools from cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure can monitor these times, giving developers useful data they can use to fine-tune their serverless apps and improve them over time. Furthermore, regular audits of function execution times will assist in quickly detecting potential problems before they worsen.

2. Record Error Rates on the Serverless App

Errors can wreak havoc on serverless application performance. Monitoring error rates can identify any functions or code snippets that require debugging. The major cloud providers all have native monitoring tools that offer powerful insights into application errors that can pinpoint potentially problematic areas quickly and reliably.

Analyzing error patterns also offers valuable predictive capabilities that can prevent further issues, improving overall application reliability.

EXPLORE: Using serverless to build and modernize applications for scale.

3. Optimize Resources on the Serverless App

Understanding how resources are used is invaluable in diagnosing serverless application issues, which is why monitoring CPU utilization and memory consumption is vitally important.

Tools such as Microsoft Azure Monitor, Google’s Stackdriver and AWS CloudWatch can help with resource consumption analysis. Tracking these metrics over time also provides key clues as to where allocation adjustments or capacity planning is needed.

4. Reduce Latency with Profiling Tools and Mitigation Techniques

Cold start issues can increase application latency. That negatively affects the application’s performance and ultimately reduces employee productivity.

To mitigate this, profiling tools offer insight into why cold start issues occur, as well as effective mitigation techniques such as scheduling regular invocations to keep functions warm.

Furthermore, these tools enable more comprehensive optimization of serverless apps by offering insight into performance beyond cold start issues alone.

LEARN MORE: How digital transformation can drive app modernization.

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