Technology continues to evolve and solutions for hosting applications continue to expand. One such method of application hosting that has been growing in popularity is Serverless Computing.

What is Serverless Computing?

Put simply, Serverless Computing is a cloud-computing execution model managed by cloud providers who run the servers hosting your application. Therefore, instead of you having to patch, secure and scale servers, your cloud provider now takes care of it. In addition, pricing for serverless computing is based on the number of resources consumed over time, rather than set hardware capacity. AWS Lambda sums it up nicely: “Run code without thinking about servers. Pay only for the compute time you consume.” Some other major Serverless providers include Azure Functions, Google Cloud Serverless, Alibaba Function Compute, and IBM Cloud Functions.

The Challenge of Serverless Monitoring

In traditional application monitoring, you have dedicated resources (servers, databases, caches, etc), while with serverless application monitoring your infrastructure is made up of transient functions. With that, you also lose visibility and access to the underlying infrastructure running your code. These Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) environments are usually closed proprietary, which leaves us without any means to install monitoring agents for logging, tracing, analysis, etc.

Top Serverless Monitoring Tools

This brings us to the Serverless Monitoring Tools which specialize in addressing the challenges of serverless observability. The following list covers the top Serverless Monitoring Tools followed by lists of platforms, open-source solutions, security, and other serverless resources.

Every few weeks I will edit and add to this list of Top Serverless Monitoring Tools/Solutions. If you think the list is missing a solution or have suggestions regarding those currently listed, let me know. These top 10 tools are not listed in any particular order, they simply represent the current recommended Serverless Monitoring Tools as of today.

Aggregate critical serverless metrics in one place for a birds-eye view. Detect and resolve incidents spanning all of your service architecture, whether serverless functions, containers, or VMs. Collect custom business metrics from serverless functions without adding any resource overhead to invocations. Address underprovisioned or misconfigured serverless functions for performance and cost benefits.

Cost: Free 14 day trial or starts at $15/month.

Epsagon specializes in automated tracing for cloud microservices, whether containers and serverless, in a cloud-based environment. It monitors and helps troubleshoot problems with production and development apps and microservices.

Cost: Free 14 day trial of from $99/month.

Thundra helped run the serverless platform at Opsgenie. As a commercial company, it helps monitor, debug, and secure serverless workloads on AWS Lambda. Understand and manage the aggregate set of distributed services an application consumes down to the line level of the runtime code for every local service, serverless or container-based applications.

Cost: Free plan or from $100/month.

Monitor your applications that run on serverless or on-premises. CloudWatch collects data at every layer of the performance stack, including metrics and logs on automatic dashboards.

Cost: Free trial or Calculate.

Dashbird is an AWS Lambda monitoring & debugging platform which helps developers to deliver bullet-proof and fast serverless applications by offering actionable insights and debugging features. It makes software and app development quicker, leaner, and helps to optimize costs. Dashbird uses Cloudwatch logs in order to offer in-depth analytics and the 2-minute setup doesn’t require any code changes.

Cost: Free basic plan or from $115/month.

6. Site24x7 – Monitor AWS Lambda.

Measure key performance counters including invocations, errors, duration, and throttles. Configure alarms to identify function latencies and code execution bottlenecks and debug function errors/crashes with log support.

Cost: Free trial or from $9/month.

New Relic’s cloud-based platform does for your monitoring what serverless is doing for your development and operations processes. It’s easy to instrument all your resources and services in minutes, trace transactions from end to end, then start querying, analyzing, and receiving intelligent alerts for what’s happening throughout your environment.

Cost: Free trial or from $15 per million invocations.

Lumigo is building a serverless intelligence platform that helps developers understand and troubleshoot their serverless applications. The platform analyzes huge amounts of data, learns the normal behavior of the serverless application, and produces live visual maps and insights that let developers identify and fix issues in their serverless applications even before they happen.

Cost: Free plan or from $99/month.

SignalFx enables real-time cloud monitoring and observability for infrastructure, microservices, and applications by collecting and analyzing metrics and traces across every component in your cloud environment. Built on a scalable streaming architecture, SignalFx applies advanced analytics and data science-directed troubleshooting to let operators find the root cause of issues in seconds.

Cost: Free trial or from $15 Per host, per month.

Rookout can then collect developer-defined information about the serverless code, allowing them to track issues even while the application is live running in a serverless environment.

Cost: Free plan or from $75 per month.

Additional Serverless Monitoring Tools

OpenTelemetry – OpenTelemetry makes robust, portable telemetry a built-in feature of cloud-native software.

Lightstep – Simple Observability for Deep Systems.

Bluemedora – Monitor AWS Lambda in Google Stackdriver.

Stackdriver – Monitoring applications running on Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services.

Appdynamics – AWS Lambda monitoring.

Dynatrace – AWS Lambda monitoring.

IO|Pipe (Acquired by New Relic) – serverless DevOps platform.

Serverless Development Resources

Cloudacademy – Serverless Training.

Serverless.com – The Serverless Application Framework powered by AWS Lambda, API Gateway, and more.

Slappforge – Serverless Development Platform + Built-in Monitoring Platform.

Stackery.io – Build, manage, & deliver production-grade serverless applications.

Twilio – Build and run apps with a fully managed serverless environment.

Pulumi – Serverless In Just a Few Lines of Code.

Open-Source Serverless Tools

Open.iron.io – Open source serverless computing platform.

Kubeless – A Kubernetes-native serverless framework.

Fission – Open source, Kubernetes-native Serverless Framework.

Openfaas – Serverless Functions Made Simple for Docker and Kubernetes.

Fn Project – Open Source. Container-native. Serverless platform.

Openwhisk – open-source, distributed Serverless platform.

terraform.io – Deliver infrastructure as code with Terraform.

Serverless Security Solutions

Paloalto – Container and serverless security. Full lifecycle, full-stack security.

Protego.io – Serverless Security that is Fully Automated.

Twistlock – Securing VMs, containers, serverless functions, service meshes, or a mixture of all.

Snyk.io – Securing your serverless applications.

Aqua – Serverless Security for Serverless Containers and Functions.