9 Best Tools to Monitor and Debug Serverless Applications

Serverless architecture is gaining popularity among developers for building cloud-native applications. The key benefit of serverless is that it eliminates the need to manage servers, so developers can focus on writing code. However, monitoring and debugging serverless applications comes with its own set of challenges.

In this comprehensive guide, we will explore the top 9 tools to effectively monitor, trace, profile and debug your serverless applications.

Introduction

Serverless applications are highly distributed with multiple functions and layers interacting to serve a request. Tracing a request end-to-end and identifying performance bottlenecks is difficult.

Also, the stateless nature of serverless functions makes debugging tricky. The ephemeral nature of containers running the function means you cannot login and debug.

Thankfully, the serverless ecosystem has matured and several purpose-built tools have emerged to address these challenges.

When choosing a monitoring tool for serverless, you need to evaluate based on the following criteria:

• Visibility – How well can the tool show you an overview of all functions, metrics, logs and traces?

• Alerting – Does it allow configuring alerts based on metrics and errors?

• Tracing – What is the level of granularity for distributed tracing? Can it trace inside functions?

• Debugging – Does it allow debugging code by reproducing errors through replay, snapshots, etc?

• Profiling – Can it help identify performance issues and bottlenecks?

• Reporting – Does it have out-of-the-box reporting for errors, performance, costs etc?

Let‘s look at some of the popular serverless monitoring tools that score high on these criteria.

1. Dashbird

Dashbird provides operational insights for serverless applications on AWS Lambda. It offers monitoring, alerting, debugging, and profiling capabilities in a single platform.

Key Features

• Real-time Lambda metrics and enhanced CloudWatch logs

• Alerts for errors and performance regressions

• Replay debugging to reproduce errors in the console

• Distributed tracing powered by AWS X-Ray

• Lambda cost analysis and recommendations

• Pre-built reports and charts for observability

Dashbird auto-discovers Lambda functions and metrics out-of-the-box. The dashboard provides an overview of application health with alerts, metrics, and tracing.

The error alerts and replay debugging accelerate root cause analysis. You can inspect stack traces, execution logs, and replay the invocation that failed.

Tracing integrates with AWS X-Ray to provide an end-to-end view of requests across functions. The flame graph visualization makes performance bottlenecks easy to spot.

Dashbird has a free tier for developers to monitor up to 1 million invocations per month.

When To Use

Use Dashbird if you need an easy-to-use, full-featured serverless monitoring solution on AWS. It reduces debugging and performance tuning time significantly.

2. Lumigo

Lumigo is a monitoring and debugging tool optimized for AWS Lambda. It helps troubleshoot and optimize Lambda applications rapidly.

Key Features

• Distributed tracing to follow requests end-to-end

• Replay debugging with context replay and step debugging

• Lambda performance insights and bottleneck identification

• Root cause analysis for failures and exceptions

• Real-time custom metrics and enhanced CloudWatch logs

• Alerting to notify on errors via email, Slack or PagerDuty

• Lambda cost breakdown and optimization recommendations

Lumigo automatically instruments Lambda functions without code changes using AWS Lambda layers. The tracing library provides detailed insights into every invocation and transaction.

The replay debugging feature lets you debug errors by re-executing the function on past events. You can step through the code like a debugger.

Lumigo has a free tier for up to 1 million transactions per month. Paid plans start at $29 per month.

When To Use

Use Lumigo if you need powerful debugging for Node.js and Python Lambda functions, and ability to drill down into individual invocations.

3. Thundra

Thundra offers advanced monitoring, debugging, and tracing for serverless applications. It supports AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions.

Key Features

• Metrics, logs, and distributed traces for serverless functions

• Debugging with configurable debug sessions and snapshots

• Alerts on metrics, errors, cold starts, and custom events

• Thundra Sidekick for Java, Node.js, Python runtime observability

• Automated discovery of serverless resources

• Real-time function profiling to identify bottlenecks

• CI/CD integration and lifecycle management

Thundra instruments the function runtime automatically via agents. This enables collecting detailed metrics and stack traces without code changes.

The Sidekick library provides additional insights like SQL query monitoring for datastores, and HTTP request tracing.

Thundra offers advanced debugging capabilities like configurable debug profiles and Lambda snapshots. You can take snapshots of an active function at runtime to inspect state and debug.

Thundra has a free tier for individuals and teams to get started. Paid plans start at $29 per month.

When To Use

Use Thundra if you need a unified observability platform across cloud providers. The advanced debugging features help troubleshoot the most complex issues.

4. Epsagon

Epsagon is a monitoring and tracing tool for serverless applications across cloud platforms. It aims to provide end-to-end visibility using distributed tracing and AI-powered analytics.

Key Features

• Automated instrumentation of functions with zero code changes

• Distributed transaction tracing across services

• Performance monitoring with bottleneck identification

• AI-driven anomaly detection for issues

• Filterable logs with full-text search

• Real-time custom metrics and enhanced platform metrics

• Alerting via email, Slack, PagerDuty and more

• Support for AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions

Epsagon‘s trace collector automatically instruments functions and collects detailed traces using eBPF technology at the Linux kernel level.

The AI engine analyzes the traces to surface insights about performance issues, costly services, anomalies etc. This helps tackle issues proactively before they cause failures.

Epsagon has a free tier for up to 10,000 events per month. Paid plans start at $14 per month billed annually.

When To Use

Use Epsagon if you need an easy-to-use tracing tool with powerful AI capabilities for surface insights from traces.

5. IOpipe

IOpipe provides application monitoring, alerting, and debugging services for serverless. It supports AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and Azure Functions.

Key Features

• Real-time serverless observability dashboards

• Performance metrics, enhanced logging, and distributed tracing

• Configurable alerts to notify on errors and metrics

• Timeline and flame graph visualizations to spot bottlenecks

• Replay debugging with context and snapshots

• Lambda profiling for Node.js and Python runtimes

• Support for multiple languages and platforms

IOpipe auto-discovers serverless resources from the cloud provider APIs. The agents instrument code at runtime without changes.

For Node.js, IOpipe provides CPU profiling capabilities to identify hot functions impacting performance.

The replay debugging feature lets you re-execute past invocations while debugging. Snapshots capture function state for inspection.

IOpipe has a free tier for up to 1 million invocations per month. Paid plans start at $7 per month for 5 million invocations.

When To Use

Use IOpipe for unified observability across cloud providers. The advanced profiling makes it great for optimizing Node.js Lambda performance.

6. Stackery

Stackery provides cloud-based management, monitoring, and debugging for serverless applications on AWS.

Key Features

• Centralized dashboard to manage all Lambda functions

• Real-time logging, metrics, and alerting

• Replay debugging to locally reproduce errors

• Local sandbox environments for testing before deploying

• Version control, CI/CD, and environment management

• Visual workflow editor for serverless app configuration

• Permissions management and access controls

• Infrastructure as code support

Stackery auto-discovers resources on AWS and draws relationship maps to visualize the serverless architecture. Granular RBAC controls can restrict access for users.

The visual editor makes it easy to define serverless workflows and configure Lambda interactions. Environment variables, secrets, and config can be managed centrally.

For debugging, Stackery continuously streams logs and allows replay debugging functions locally. The local sandbox mimics cloud environments for testing pre-deployment.

Stackery offers a free trial tier. Paid plans start at $12 per month per user.

When To Use

Use Stackery if you want great visualization for complex serverless workflows on AWS. The debugging helps developers reproduce issues locally.

7. SignalFx

SignalFx is a real-time monitoring and observability platform by Splunk. It can monitor metrics, traces, and logs for serverless applications.

Key Features

• Metrics and logging for AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, GCP Functions

• Distributed tracing with automatic service discovery

• Real-time streaming analytics for metrics

• Advanced correlation to connect inter-related events

• Infrastructure monitoring for underlying resources

• AI-powered directed troubleshooting

• Alerting based on anomalies and thresholds

• Integrations with Slack, PagerDuty, ServiceNow etc.

SignalFx provides a single data platform and query language for metrics, traces, and logs. The advanced analytics help troubleshoot performance issues and outages faster.

The Smart Agent auto-discovers resources and collects metrics and traces without code changes. The Smart Gateway streams logs at scale for correlation.

SignalFx has a free trial for 14 days. Paid plans start at $15 per month for a single host.

When To Use

Use SignalFx if you need real-time analytics and directed troubleshooting to quickly pinpoint issues in complex systems.

8. New Relic

New Relic offers serverless monitoring and observability capabilities as part of its broader APM platform.

Key Features

• Performance metrics forAWS Lambda, Azure Functions and GCP Cloud Functions

• Distributed tracing to analyze transaction latency

• Error monitoring and custom alerting

• Visualization of architecture and workload

• Correlation of metrics, events, and logs

• Serverless cost optimization recommendations

• Reporting on adoption, performance, errors etc.

New Relic automatically instruments serverless functions to collect rich telemetry without code changes. The distributed tracing provides an end-to-end view of complex transactions.

The platform correlates metrics, events, logs, and traces using applied intelligence. Custom nerdpacks can visualize serverless data in real-time dashboards.

New Relic offers a free tier to get started. Paid plans provide additional features starting at $99 per month.

When To Use

Use New Relic if you already use other parts of their APM platform. The correlation helps connect serverless monitoring data with other systems.

9. Datadog

Datadog provides monitoring, tracing, and logging for serverless applications. It has out-of-the-box dashboards tailored for serverless visibility.

Key Features

• Metrics, traces, and logs for AWS Lambda and Azure Functions

• System dashboards highlighting anomalies and errors

• Continuous profiling to optimize performance

• Distributed tracing with configurable depth and sampling

• Alerts based on metrics, request latency, and errors

• Log correlation with metrics and traces

• Live containers to replay traffic for debugging

Datadog auto-instruments serverless applications via function wrappers. It periodically profiles invocations to identify optimization opportunities.

The distributed APM traces requests across services, and correlates them with logs and metrics using unique request IDs.

Datadog offers a 15-day free trial. Paid plans start at $15 per host per month.

When To Use

Use Datadog if you are already using it to monitor the rest of your infrastructure. The seamless correlation provides end-to-end visibility.

Key Takeaways

• Look for tools that offer visibility, alerting, profiling, and debugging tailored for serverless apps.

• Distributed tracing is essential to follow complex requests across stateless functions.

• Error alerting and notifications help tackle failures early before customers notice them.

• Replay debugging helps understand and reproduce errors locally.

• Profiling and sampling are key to identifying performance bottlenecks.

• Evaluate tools like Dashbird, Lumigo, Thundra which are purpose-built for serverless. For unified observability, SignalFx, Datadog and New Relic are great choices.

Observability is crucial for serverless applications to deliver great customer experiences. Investing in a proper monitoring strategy will pay dividends in the long run.