Extending observability to app infrastructure

We know organizations today rely on software applications to drive their digital transformation, providing customers with the tools, features and experience end-users have come to expect when doing things such as transact, work and communicate, to name a few.

Ensuring a great user experience, however, means making sure the various elements making up a usable application are running smoothly and reliably.

Now we know this is not always the case, since things do break. End-to-end observability is designed to provide visibility and actionable insight into your systems to proactively find and fix issues before users ever notice them. But enterprise companies running multiple types of systems, across various tech stacks, make getting that key data difficult, leading to longer mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to resolution (MTTR) indicators when an issue occurs - resulting in a potentially poor user experience.

At Sumo Logic, we’ve always had visibility for application components, which are third-party products such as web servers, messaging systems and databases and form an integral part of your application’s stack.

In 2021, we’ve released a number of new and updated Sumo Logic applications for the most popular application components:

These Sumo Logic applications now have fully supported metrics and logs collection across all on-premise, cloud and Kubernetes environments. Apps include pre-built dashboards and alerts (via Sumo Logic Monitors) that allow you to filter data by app component cluster, host and deployment environment.

With these new apps, you can now:

• Get comprehensive visibility into the health, performance, resource utilization of critical app components to ensure that your revenue generating production apps are functioning reliably so as to deliver the best possible end-user experience

• Quickly troubleshoot issues across multiple environments thereby reducing your mean time to investigation (MTTI) and mean time to recovery (MTTR) which ultimately help you reduce costs

Examples

Here we describe examples of how our out-of-the-box app dashboards can help you address real-world observability use cases. Check out our blog on how pre-built monitors can help you proactively monitor your application infrastructure.

The Apache - Web Server Operations Dashboard provides an at-a-glance view of the operations of your Apache web servers. Dashboard panels show information on bots, geographic locations, errors and URLs. Use this dashboard to get insight into the operations of your websites and which areas need the most attention.

The Nginx Plus Ingress - Ingress Controller Metrics dashboard provides you insight on the status, reloads, failure of Kubernetes Nginx Plus ingress controller. Use this dashboard to get information about the status of your Nginx Ingress Controllers, reload operations and errors, which helps you understand their availability, performance and health.

Messaging Systems

The Kafka - Broker dashboard provides an at-a-glance view of the state of your partitions, active controllers, leaders, throughput, and network across Kafka brokers and clusters. You can use this dashboard to monitor under-replicated and offline partitions, out-of-sync replicas, request rates and flush rates to quickly identify if a Kafka broker is available, over/under-utilized, is missing data or is performing as expected.

The RabbitMQ - Queue dashboard provides an at-a-glance view of the state of your queues in your RabbitMQ clusters. You can use this dashboard to monitor consumers, queues, message rates, memory and queue errors to determine if your clusters are healthy, performing and using resources as expected.

Databases

The MySQL Slow Queries dashboard provides insights into all slow queries executed on the database. You can use this dashboard to quickly determine which queries have been identified as slow or excessively slow, monitor which users and hosts tend to invoke/run slow queries, determine which SQL commands are slower than others and examine slow query trends to determine if there are when performance bottlenecks generally occur across MySQL database clusters.

The PostgreSQL - Error Logs dashboard provides insight into database error logs by specifically monitoring errors, user activity, database activity and database shutdown/start events. You can use this dashboard to quickly identify errors, outliers and patterns in logs while troubleshooting as well as to identify unexpected database or user activity.

Summary

In conclusion, these new Sumo Logic apps can help you comprehensively monitor your critical application components that identify key service level indicators (SLI) and reduce MTTD and MTTI, which further help you achieve your Service Level Objectives (SLO).

Get Started Now!

To get started, check out the following recently released or updated Sumo Logic apps for application components:

Web Servers
Apache
Global Intelligence for Apache Tomcat
Global Intelligence for Apache
NGINX
NGINX Ingress
NGINX Plus
NGINX Plus Ingress
Tomcat
Varnish

Databases
Cassandra
Memcached
Elasticsearch
Microsoft SQL Server
MongoDB
MySQL
PostgreSQL
Redis

Streaming Platforms
ActiveMQ
Kafka
RabbitMQ
If you don’t yet have a Sumo Logic account, you can sign up for a free trial today.

Additional Resources

For more great DevOps and security focused reads, check out the Sumo Logic blog.

Download the Sumo Logic Continuous Intelligence Report that quantitatively defines the state of the modern application stack and the shift in technology used by enterprises adopting cloud and DevSecOps during the COVID-19 global pandemic.