How to Get Real-Time Visibility Into Serverless Apps

Adam Johnson, CEO and co-founder of IOpipe, discusses the challenges and best practices of monitoring serverless applications, which have grown in adoption by 75% since 2017. Unlike traditional architectures, serverless systems emphasize business logic over infrastructure, as the latter is managed by cloud providers, enabling developers to focus on delivering customer value quickly and cost-effectively. Serverless monitoring requires different tools to handle the unique challenges of tracing millions of invocations and diagnosing performance issues like cold starts, particularly for languages such as Java. Despite serverless advantages such as reduced costs and faster deployment, developers often struggle with observability. To address this, Johnson recommends setting up alerts for application failures and unexpected invocation drops, and using structured logs to simplify debugging. IOpipe also offers integration with PagerDuty for real-time alerts, enhancing visibility and reliability for organizations such as Rackspace and Comic Relief.