Using Amazon Managed Service for Grafana to Troubleshoot a Serverless Application

To build and deploy the application for the first time, run the following in your shell:

sam build -p -u
sam deploy --guided

The first command will build the Lambda functions in parallel using a container. The second command will package and deploy your application to AWS, with a series of prompts:

• Stack Name: The name of the stack to deploy to CloudFormation. This should be unique to your account and region. We will use amg-blog throughout this sample.
• AWS Region: The AWS region you want to deploy your app to.
• Confirm changes before deploy: If set to yes, any change sets will be shown to you before execution for manual review. If set to no, the AWS SAM CLI will automatically deploy application changes.
• Allow SAM CLI IAM role creation: Many AWS SAM templates, including this example, create AWS IAM roles required for the AWS Lambda function(s) included to access AWS services. By default, these are scoped down to minimum required permissions. To deploy an AWS CloudFormation stack which creates or modified IAM roles, the CAPABILITY_IAM value for capabilities must be provided. If permission isn't provided through this prompt, to deploy this example you must explicitly pass --capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM to the sam deploy command.
• Save arguments to samconfig.toml: If set to yes, your choices will be saved to a configuration file inside the project, so that in the future you can just re-run sam deploy without parameters to deploy changes to your application.

Generate API traffic

We need to generate some metrics and logs to use as part of our troubleshooting exercise.

This step will generate traffic to the API Gateway endpoint, which will invoke the HttpHandlerFunction Lambda function repeatedly for 15 minutes. The code will randomly inject errors into the HTTP requests, which can be found by correllating the function metrics and logs. Find the GenerateTrafficFunction name from the sam deploy output. It will be of the form amg-blog-GenerateTrafficFunction-1234567ABCDEF.

Invoke the Lambda function using the AWS CLI:

aws lambda invoke --function-name <your-function-name> --invocation-type Event /dev/null

Replace <your-function-name> above with the name of the Lambda function from the sam deploy output.

We use an asynchronous (event-based) invocation here because we don't retrieve a return value, and send the output to /dev/null because we don't need to work with it in a file.

Cleanup

To delete the sample application that you created, use the AWS CLI. Assuming you used your project name for the stack name, you can run the following:

aws cloudformation delete-stack --stack-name amg-blog