Stackdriver Adds Automation Tools And Endpoint Checks To Its AWS Monitoring Solution

Stackdriver, a monitoring service for Amazon Web Services, is adding a number of policy-driven automation features to its platform today. Instead of just getting alerts when there are issues, users can now also decided how to fix these without having to manually start and stop servers. In addition, Stackdriver is also today launched the ability to monitor endpoints like websites and third-party APIs.

These new services are now available to all Stackdriver Pro users and those who sign up before the end of the year. After that, they will become part of Stackdriver’s yet-to-be announced “Elite” plan. All Pro customers who sign up before December 31 will be automatically upgraded to this new plan.

Automation

Most monitoring services do a great job at alerting users when something goes wrong. Say an application is running out of memory or a noisy neighbor is degrading the performance of a server. Or a Relational Database Service (RDS) instance is running out of memory and you need to add more capacity. That’s important to know, but if it happens at 2am, a developer still has to wake up and take action based on this information. With automation, Stackdriver users can now set a number of policies for how to react when certain alert thresholds are met. Stackdriver then makes the right API calls to AWS on its users’ behalf.

So instead of having to start and stop an instance when the performance on a host is degraded, users can now just set a trigger to start this process automatically. Optionally, users can then get a notification for when every step in this process is completed (by email, SMS or PagerDuty). Other options include the ability to delay actions by a set amount of minutes, which is useful for situations when resources may be able to recover without intervention.

For now, Stackdriver Automation will be able to reboot instances, move Elastic Block Store-backed instances and add additional capacity to an RDS instance. Additional features, the company’s co-founder Izzy Azeri told me, are also in the works.

Endpoint Monitoring

All of Stackdriver’s alerting features now also tie in with its new endpoint monitoring system. This system, the company argues, “lets you fill in this last piece of monitoring the full stack of your application by setting up periodic checks of an endpoint within your environment from a number of locations around the world.” Developers can use this to ensure that a certain API they rely on is up and running, for example. You can find more information about Stackdriver’s monitoring system here.