Header background

Seamless AI-powered observability for multicloud serverless applications

Serverless applications often consist of hundreds of loosely coupled services from multiple disparate sources, which can make it hard to ensure observability and automate tasks. Dynatrace has extended its end-to-end observability and advanced AIOps capabilities for the most widely used serverless services across major cloud vendors, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. As a result, DevOps, and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams can automatically analyze, troubleshoot, and optimize serverless applications to drive innovation at scale.

Cloud vendors such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Google provide a wide spectrum of serverless services for compute and event-driven workloads, databases, storage, messaging, and other purposes. Engineers often choose best-of-breed services from multiple sources to create a single application. It’s becoming increasingly difficult, however, to get end-to-end visibility and real-time insights into these heavily distributed, complex environments. With the increase of interconnected functions and other services, end-to-end traceability becomes essential.

AI-powered automation and deep, broad observability for serverless architectures

Dynatrace extends deep and broad observability and advanced AIOps capabilities to cover the most important serverless services. In addition to existing support for AWS Lambda, this support now covers Microsoft Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions as well as managed Kubernetes environments, messaging queues, and cloud databases across all major cloud providers.

This enables your DevOps teams to get a holistic overview of their multicloud serverless applications.

Multicloud serverless application dashboard at a glance
Fig. 1 Multicloud serverless application dashboard at a glance

Have a look at the full range of supported technologies.

Tracing becomes simple thanks to an easy and extensible approach that leverages existing Dynatrace technology, such as PurePath® distributed tracing for end-to-end, automatic, code-level visibility, and Davis, the Dynatrace AI engine, for root-cause-analysis. This enables proactive AI-driven analysis and easy troubleshooting in serverless scenarios.

In addition, Davis provides automatic alerting of service-to-service communication problems using queues and other event systems. This, in turn, helps DevOps teams to pinpoint common problem patterns in their serverless functions rather than in an event-driven architecture.

Automatic detected queues anomaly by AI engine Davis
Fig. 2 Automatic detected queues anomaly by AI engine Davis

Easy and effortless FaaS insights with a single line of code

With limitations of FaaS services to run third-party agents, like the restrictions in executing third party tools and limited access to underlying infrastructure, Open observability standards such as OpenTelemetry are now increasingly important in overcoming the hurdles of instrumentation.

Dynatrace uses OpenTelemetry and expands it by adding a language-specific Dynatrace exporter to unlock PurePath distributed tracing capabilities such as automatic service-detection and analysis.

Using OpenTelemetry typically requires a decent amount of boiler-plate code for initialization and basic instrumentation. While cloud vendors continue to invest in open standards (for example, AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry and Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Exporter for .NET, Node.js, and Python applications), a lot of setup effort is still required to use them.

To optimize the developer experience, Dynatrace provides FaaS libraries, making it as easy as adding a single line of code to your functions to enable OpenTelemetry-based tracing.

With the expanded tracing across your entire stack, the full end-to-end visibility enables you to understand and deeply analyze the impact of the serverless tiers in your applications (see example below), showing a trace with multiple serverless services including functions, Cloud-Queues, serverless databases, and application services.

End-to-end distributed trace including Azure Functions
Fig. 3 End-to-end distributed trace including Azure Functions

New to Dynatrace?

Within the next 90 days, all enhancements mentioned in this blog post will be available to all Dynatrace customers. Stay tuned for updates.

Visit our trial page for a free 15-day Dynatrace trial.

To learn more about how Dynatrace can help your business, visit Dynatrace.com and read our recent blogs.