May 2020 Summaries

Lumigo Insights is a system designed to automatically detect irregularities in serverless functions and trigger alerts when anomalies are detected. It solves the problem of not knowing about issues with applications or services until they become severe, allowing users to take action quickly. The system monitors functions for deviations from normal behavior, comparing data across different timeframes to identify spikes in invocations or error rates. Out-of-the-box alerts can be sent to Slack or email, and alerts can be muted, assigned to specific team members, or added to Jira tasks.

The author of the text uses Lumigo, a tool that records context about each Lambda invocation, including environment variables, to debug an error in a client project. The error occurred after a deployment and was initially suspected to be related to code changes rather than environmental changes. By comparing snapshots of environment variables using Lumigo, the author quickly identified that the issue was caused by a change in the SSM parameter value used to share infrastructure configuration between services. This allowed them to identify the root cause of the problem and resolve it quickly, highlighting the benefits of using Lumigo for debugging purposes.

May 15, 2020 Lumigo's System Map is a real-time visualization of an entire application's infrastructure, providing a bird's eye view with filters to drill down into specific subsets. This tool solves the problem of managing complex distributed systems that have grown exponentially in scale and complexity. It helps developers navigate convoluted transactions behind the scenes, understand how each request is handled, and identify problem areas. The System Map offers filtering options, clustering capability, and tools for correlating services, making it easier to plan architecture, refactor code, and troubleshoot issues. Lumigo's System Map is free to use and sets up automatically in just a couple of minutes.

Lumigo’s Transaction Timeline is a tool that helps developers monitor and profile transactions in a microservices architecture, allowing them to identify bottlenecks and issues. It solves the problem of distributed tracing, which is complex due to the independent nature of microservices and the ephemeral nature of AWS Lambda containers. With Lumigo, developers can track down transactions across multiple services, including AWS services and third-party APIs, and visualize their interactions in a timeline view. This view provides detailed information on request times and execution times, making it easier to identify bottlenecks and improve performance. Additionally, the tool displays the total cost of transactions, providing a better overall cost breakdown. Lumigo's Transaction Timeline is available for free and can be set up in under 5 minutes with its onboarding wizard.