AWS announced App Mesh at AWS re:Invent 2018, a service mesh that makes it easy to monitor and control microservices running on AWS. Recently, it’s become generally available. Today, Wavefront is extending its AWS and service mesh support with an integration for AWS App Mesh.
Wavefront, a cloud-native monitoring platform, delivers out-of-the-box observability and analytics for a number of AWS services. Wavefront’s App Mesh integration provides out-of-the-box visibility into App Mesh metrics and distributed traces, making it easy to debug and identify the cause of any communication issues between microservices. Additionally, with this packaged visibility, SREs and developers can proactively detect and troubleshoot any health issues or performance anomalies in their key cloud services and meet exceptionally high SLAs.
What is AWS App Mesh?
AWS App Mesh is a service mesh based on the Envoy proxy that makes it easy to monitor and control containerized microservices. App Mesh standardizes how your microservices communicate, giving developers and SREs visibility and helping to ensure high availability for your applications. With this standardization, App Mesh removes the need to update application code to change how monitoring data is collected or traffic is routed between microservices. Using App Mesh, you can export observability data to multiple AWS and third-party tools including tracing tools that integrate with Envoy. It can be used with Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and Kubernetes on EC2 to better run containerized microservices at scale.
Critical KPIs to Monitor in AWS App Mesh
In any service mesh, including AWS App Mesh, critical KPIs to monitor are as follows:
- The health of the service mesh
- The health of your services
- Performance/Activity of your services
App Mesh uses Envoy proxy as the data plane, so you can determine the health of the mesh from Envoy proxy health stats. Envoy proxy also provides many health and activity metrics for different service clusters. Here are the relevant metrics for the main components to monitor in a mesh.
For a detailed list of all Envoy Proxy statics, please refer to this link.
OOTB App Mesh Observability with Wavefront
Wavefront collects metrics for App Mesh and its services health and performance via the Envoy proxy. Over 600 App Mesh/Envoy health and performance metrics are collected OOTB by the Wavefront integration. Additionally, Wavefront provides pre-built dashboards for App Mesh enabling SREs and developers to quickly visualize, monitor and troubleshoot any issues.
The overall health of App Mesh clusters shown in Wavefront
App Mesh Envoy proxy health metrics shown in Wavefront
App Mesh service performance metrics shown in Wavefront
Identify Sources of Latency with App Mesh Distributed Tracing in Wavefront
Distributed tracing allows developers and SREs to obtain visualizations of call flows in large microservices-based distributed systems. It can be invaluable in understanding serialization, parallelism, and sources of latency enabling developers and SREs to identify services that need optimization. Envoy provides the capability for reporting tracing information regarding communications between services in the mesh. However, to be able to correlate the different pieces of traces generated by different envoy proxies and get a complete call flow across different proxies, the application needs to propagate certain trace context. Wavefront, with its Zipkin integration, ingests distributed traces information from Envoy proxies and provides distributed traces visualization for App Mesh.
App Mesh distributed tracing view in Wavefront
See Beyond App Mesh – Holistic AWS Visualization, Monitoring & Analytics
In addition to App Mesh, Wavefront provides built-in integrations for many popular AWS services including Amazon EC2, Amazon EKS, AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis Firehose, and Amazon Redshift. Each of these AWS integrations automatically collects relevant health and performance metrics from Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, and appropriate AWS APIs and displays the information in easy to understand, pre-built dashboards. Once the metrics are flowing into Wavefront, you can issue smart queries, using Wavefront Query Language and quickly understand overall usage and patterns seen in your AWS environment. Learn more about Wavefront’s enhanced AWS UI here.
Conclusion
AWS App Mesh standardizes how your microservices communicate in, helping you ensure high availability for your applications running in AWS. Wavefront provides built-in integrations for multiple AWS services including AWS App Mesh. With Wavefront’s App Mesh integration, you get out-of-the-box visibility into App Mesh metrics and distributed traces, making it easy to debug and identify the cause of any communication issues between your App Mesh services. Furthermore, with Wavefront, you can easily monitor, correlate and analyze the performance of different AWS services, applications, and infrastructure. For more information, check out our free trial today.
The post Wavefront Delivers Observability and Analytics for AWS App Mesh appeared first on Wavefront by VMware.
