How a leading fintech company running microservices on AWS ECS, accelerated its product engineering efforts with Apica
ECS | FARGATE | CLOUDWATCH | RBAC
Company details
The client provides one of the world’s leading Internet of Things (IoT) platforms delivering industry-leading device management and application enablement. Their platform enables product manufacturers, service providers, and enterprises to connect devices to any application and achieve digital transformation. Their platform is available as a managed cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) with unrivaled flexibility and modularity that promotes rapid changes to practically any point of their platform at any time. They are also experts in building enterprise-grade cloud software for IoT and automation enablement.
Industry/vertical:
Financial Services/Holding Company
Apica Solutions
- DevOps: Exporting CloudWatch logs to Apica using an AWS Lambda exporter
- Infrastructure Monitoring: Centralized
monitoring for AWS Elastic Container Services and AWS Lambda so that developers can rapidly iterate and accelerate their product development. - Secure Collaboration: Enable distributed teams to collaboratively monitor and analyse logs from ECS and Lambda.
“Apica SaaS looks perfect for our use cases"
The Challenges
The company was following a product development strategy that depended on collaboration from external partners in a distributed environment. Product development in such environments requires every collaborator to constantly be on the same page for effective collaboration. Throw in distributed applications into the mix and the need to unify the accumulation of key information and performance metrics and display them in a manner that is well-organized and easy to search and share became even more crucial.
The company wanted to negate the hassles of developing in distributed environments by using the benefits of unified and centralized logging and analysis to enable internal and external development teams to accelerate their development efforts. The complex documentation and inaccuracies that were present across different versions of their development stack made it tougher to analyse their logs efficiently and derive operational visibility and actionable insights. The complexity of their monitoring stack and relative inaccessibility of log data also meant that they weren’t able to improve operational efficiency and capitalize on optimal resource utilization.
The company also wanted to ensure that external teams that were involved in development and monitoring tasks would only have access to performance metrics and information that were relevant to them.
Solutions Brief
Apica was set up to ingest log data from the company’s AWS ECS and Fargate instances along with ingesting log data from CloudWatch. With these integrations, the company was able to unify log data from distributed data sources and access them through a single window.
The unification of log data through Apica gave the company complete visibility into their AWS-based development environment. Apica also helped provide the company with quick turnarounds for dealing with the inconsistencies across AWS service offerings and their documentation. The company also www.apica.io set up their internal and external teams with RBAC that enabled them to control access to fine-grained data based on their levels of authorization.
Results
Apica made it easy to bring critical application data in the form of logs from their development stack and monitoring stacks in one place. Apica’s quick and seamless integration with AWS ECS, Fargate, and CloudWatch made it easier to view critical information from all of these distributed sources in a single pane.
Apica’s LOG2Metrics feature also made it phenomenally simple to extract powerful metrics from log data that was otherwise tough to even access using their existing monitoring solution. LOG2Metrics also made it easier to visualize these metrics in time-series graphs that enabled them to realize patterns in their application performance and derive actionable insights, identify threats and weaknesses even before they caused real damage.
Moreover, Apica also made it easier to map application logs from ECS tasks and CloudWatch to RBAC policies, thereby making sure that every member of their distributed teams would only have access to data that was relevant to their tasks
Key Statistics
- Queries run on historical data as old as 30 days returned results in under 5 seconds.
- Unified logs from 3 distributed systems:
AWS ECS + Fargate + Lambda