Executive Summary

To ensure customers visiting its social media platform always enjoy a superior experience, the software developer needed dashboards to display the usage and performance metrics for all of its AWS infrastructure compute resources and customer-facing applications. To solve this challenge, the firm turned to Avahi Technologies, which integrated Datadog dashboards with the environment to provide visibility into the infrastructure and customer-facing applications. Avahi also configured alerts when performance metrics hit pre-set thresholds to warn the firm about potential issues. Armed with this information, the software development firm can ensure the infrastructure and applications provide customers with a superior experience.

About the Customer

The customer provisions a social media platform that offers apps for people to connect with each other around music and their culture. Customers can log into the platform to find communities and build customizable spaces to show their interests.

Customer Challenge: Integrate Datadog with AWS to Develop Performance Dashboards

To ensure customers visiting its social media platform always enjoy a superior experience, the software developer needed dashboards to display the usage metrics for all of its AWS infrastructure compute resources. The firm also needed performance metrics for its customer-facing applications. In addition, the IT team required alerts based on pre-established thresholds. This would allow the team to know if any compute resources or applications experience issues before any customers experience degraded performance while listening to music.

The customer was already collecting the required metrics using Amazon CloudWatch. They attempted to view the metrics through a third-party integration with Datadog, an observability service for cloud applications that monitors servers, databases, tools, and services.

However, the internal IT team ran into issues trying to set up the dashboards and alerts to provide the required visibility into infrastructure and application performance. The management team wanted comprehensive dashboards to ensure the AWS infrastructure components and the applications delivered the performance that customers around the world demand.

Partner Solution: Avahi Develops Required Dashboard and Alerts

To solve this challenge, the customer turned to Avahi Technologies. Avahi created dashboards in Datadog and configured the integrations with the AWS environment to collect usage metrics for each AWS infrastructure component:

• Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)
• AWS Fargate
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
• Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
• Amazon ElastiCache
• Amazon DynamoDB
• Amazon OpenSearch

Avahi also created application metrics and alerts to notify the software firm’s IT team when specific events occur. These include task utilization exceeding 80% and when the SQS queue backlog exceeds three minutes. The team is also notified when async CPU utilization is sustained at 80% or higher for more than 10 minutes, or of any unusual load balance traffic patterns that indicate a sudden spike or drop in traffic. Other alerts occur when no successful ECS task-deploy events have occurred within 30 minutes, the RDS CPU utilization goes above 50%, or if the number of RDS connections exceeds 50.

Results and Benefits: Greater Visibility Helps Deliver Superior Customer Experiences

With the usage metrics Avahi implemented, the customer now has much greater visibility into the performance of its AWS compute resources and its applications. The internal IT team can see task counts currently in a specified state for a specific service as well as when each task started and stopped. They can also see CPU and memory utilization across specified resources and the container instance counts that are part of a cluster.

For SQS messages, the IT team always knows the number available for retrieval from the queue, how many are in flight, and the age (in seconds) of the oldest message in the queue. They can also see messages added, deleted and retrieved from the queue—along with the number of messages waiting to become visible after being added to a delayed queue.

For the RDS cluster, the software firm always knows I/O (read/write) operations per second, the number of outstanding requests, and the number of deadlocks during a specified period. Other key metrics include the number of database connections in use, queries executed per second, and the amount of time a database instance has been running.

The ElastiCache metrics—CPU utilization, available memory, cache hits and misses, and the number of connected clients—identify potential bottlenecks, network issues, and problems with client applications. For DynamoDB, the customer knows the number of read/write requests that were throttled because they exceeded the provisioned throughput. They can also view the latency for read/write requests, which provides insights into the responsiveness of the DynamoDB table. Similarly, OpenSearch metrics include the percentage of heap memory in use. Excessive heap usage can lead to performance issues.

On the application side, the IT team gets deep insights into application performance and reliability to identify potential problems in real time. These include request/response times, the ratio of request successes to failures, the most latent requests and queries, and the median time for queries. Armed with this information, the software development firm can ensure the infrastructure and application provide customers with a superior experience as they share music with their friends.

About the Partner: Avahi Technologies

Avahi Technologies is a cloud-native focused company and Amazon Web Services (AWS) partners with a team of cloud, data, and software engineering experts and experiences obtained through years of working within the cloud ecosystem. An extraordinary team of highly-certified Avahi experts excels in architecting and operating secure, automated, cloud-based solutions built on AWS. With a focus on becoming an extension to existing customer teams, Avahi offers exceptional service and works tirelessly to build the right solutions to solve business problems.