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What If We Eliminated Apache Downtime?

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Eliminate Apache web server downtime with SIOS AppKeeper Monitoring

Eliminate* Apache web server downtime with SIOS AppKeeper Monitoring

Today Apache webservers are the most popular webservers on the Internet.  Companies are deploying mission-critical, customer-facing applications built on Apache using cloud platforms such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.  So you can bet that they are investing a lot of time and money in monitoring those applications and trying to reduce downtime. But what if we told you we could eliminate the need for manual intervention via automated monitoring and restarting applications when your Apache web servers are down?

Before we go into how we can do that, let’s step back for a minute and look at choices that companies have when it comes to monitoring and managing their Apache web servers and those critical applications.

How to monitor and protect your Apache web servers from unnecessary downtime

Anyone deploying applications using Apache webservers is either considering monitoring the health of their webservers themselves or outsourcing that task to a third party.

When it comes to monitoring cloud applications running on Amazon Web Services, a popular choice is to use Amazon CloudWatch.  Some companies are even extending the functionality of CloudWatch by creating some levels of automation by developing scripts or by using AWS Lambda.  But configuring Amazon CloudWatch properly with custom metrics and setting up AWS Lambda requires a certain amount of technical expertise that may be beyond that of many companies.  And then there is a cost and effort required to maintain any scripts as the applications evolve.

Another choice is to invest in a comprehensive Application Performance Monitoring (“APM”) solution from a vendor such as New Relics, Dynatrace, DataDog, or LogicMonitor. These can be very appropriate if you want to monitor more than just your AWS environment. APM solutions are very configurable and will provide you with a lot of data in terms of information about what happened.

But have you reduced your downtime?  Probably not.  What you have done is invested in a system that will alert you immediately if and when your Apache webservers go down, and will overload you with data (or “alert storms”) as you try to get things running again.

Some companies have decided to outsource the responsibility for monitoring and managing their applications to a trusted third party (often a “managed service provider” or MSP). In return for a base monthly fee, the MSP monitors applications and offers a core set of services, often bound by a Service Level Agreement. When alerts are received, they investigate. In some cases, these investigations can require (costly) escalations. If and when applications go down, the MSP will then take control and restart services or reboot instances where they can.  But these remediation actions are often an extra expense.

There has to be a better way.

How automated monitoring and restart with SIOS AppKeeper eliminates Apache Webserver downtime

Based on our customer experience, the average company with only three EC2 instances experiences downtime at least once a month.  “The site is down!  Drop everything. Find out what needs to be done!”  What you need to do is reduce the need for these unnecessary fire drills.

SIOS AppKeeper is a SaaS service that is easy to install and configure and monitors any services and applications running on Amazon EC2, such as your Apache httpd service.  When an anomaly is detected, AppKeeper automatically restarts the service, and if that doesn’t work it reboots the entire instance. No more reading through logs to pinpoint the reason for the failure, or escalation to developers to restart your service. Or expensive outsourcing fees.  AppKeeper provides “set-it-and-forget-it” functionality so that you can eliminate downtime.

Today hundreds of companies rely on AppKeeper to keep their cloud environments running. We invite you to check out the video below for a demonstration of how AppKeeper protects Apache webservers.  And if you like what you see, please feel free to sign up for a free 14-day trial of AppKeeper.

What If We Eliminated Apache Downtime

*Based on customer data, AppKeeper addresses 85% of application service failures. So in almost nine times out of ten AppKeeper sends out an email notifying customers that downtime was detected and the services were restarted or the instances were rebooted automatically.  Isn’t that better than panicking and digging through log files before manually restarting everything?

See related post: Why is AWS EC2 Application Monitoring So Hard?

 

Why is AWS EC2 Application Monitoring So Hard?

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Why is AWS EC2 Application Monitoring So Hard?

Why is AWS EC2 Application Monitoring So Hard?

Congratulations! You’ve migrated your core applications to the AWS cloud.  Or, you are developing new “cloud-native” applications and hosting them in the cloud.  Perhaps you are taking advantage of Amazon EC2’s scalability and its elastic architecture.  Either way, you now want to ensure that those applications stay up and running, or that you are alerted quickly if and when something happens.

Because something will happen.  Our customer data shows that companies using only three EC2 instances experience downtime at least once a month.  That means unhappy users unable to access their applications. You need a monitoring solution to tell you what’s going on.

How to narrow down EC2 application monitoring solutions

The first step in your search for the perfect EC2 monitoring solution should be to understand your requirements and your own technical capabilities.  Monitoring solutions are not all alike.

Are you interested in a feature-rich solution that monitors a wide array of systems?  Or one that focuses on a core set of systems, such as your EC2 environment?

What do you want to do with the output from your application monitoring solution?  Do you want as much information as possible to help your developers’ troubleshoot issues?  Or are you looking for quick alerts and assistance in remediating from any failures?

And what is your technical appetite to install and manage another application?  Do you love scripting?  Or do you want something that is “set-it-and-forget-it”?

A search for “application performance monitoring solutions” on Google returns 1,170,000,000 results!  Jump into the Amazon AWS Marketplace and you’ll find 453 products listed in the DevOps – Monitoring category.  Having a clear sense of your requirements and your own technical capabilities will help you narrow down your search.

Monitoring applications running on Amazon EC2 with Amazon CloudWatch or other APM solutions

If you are hosting your applications on Amazon EC2, then you might consider using Amazon CloudWatch.   How familiar are you with standard and custom metrics?  You should know that you need quite a lot of technical expertise to run Amazon CloudWatch properly. Amazon CloudWatch is a great solution for users who need data and actionable insights to respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resources and a unified view of their operational health.  But this all comes at a price in terms of the knowledge and experience needed to configure and manage Amazon CloudWatch properly.

Another choice is for you to evaluate and acquire one of the many commercially available application performance monitoring (“APM”) solutions on the market, such as from AppDynamics, Datadog, Dynatrace, or New Relic.  But keep in mind your requirements.  How broadly do you need to monitor?  And what do you intend to do with that information?  Are you ready to be overwhelmed with alerts?  And be aware that many APM solutions do nothing to help you recover beyond pinpointing the issue.  You still have to drop everything to manually restart services or reboot your instances.

Monitor applications running on Amazon EC2 using SIOS AppKeeper

But there is another way.  SIOS AppKeeper is a SaaS service that can be configured to automatically discover any EC2 instances and their services. It then automatically take any number of actions if and when downtime is experienced.  So instead of getting alerts that something is wrong, you get notified that something happened and was automatically addressed.
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SIOS AppKeeper starts at only US $40 per instance per month. We invite you to view this short video to see how easy it is to install and use AppKeeper.

Why is AWS EC2 Application Monitoring So Hard?

One of our customers, Hobby Japan, a publishing company in Tokyo, was initially using Amazon CloudWatch but their understaffed IT team couldn’t respond fast enough to alerts. They wanted to leverage automation and moved to SIOS AppKeeper.  Since moving to AppKeeper they haven’t experienced any issues or unexpected downtime with their EC2 instance. Here’s a link to a case study on Hobby Japan.

Monitoring your cloud applications shouldn’t be a full-time job.  You want a monitoring solution that is easy to install and use, doesn’t overwhelm you with alerts, and hopefully takes care of systems impairments automatically.  We encourage you to try a 14-day free trial of SIOS AppKeeper by signing up here.

Article reproduced with permission from SIOS

What is Amazon CloudWatch?

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What is Amazon CloudWatch

 

What is Amazon CloudWatch?

What you can do with CloudWatch and some hurdles to consider

With AWS boasting a dominant share of the cloud market, many companies are migrating their on-premises systems to the cloud with Amazon AWS.  So, how should a system running in the AWS environment be managed?

In this blog post, we will introduce the features of Amazon CloudWatch, a monitoring service provided by AWS, as well as the challenges of implementing it and how to solve them.

Using Amazon CloudWatch to closely monitor your AWS environment

To ensure that you have a stable cloud environment, it is important to detect anomalies (“system impairments”) quickly and respond in a timely manner.  Monitoring becomes an important and necessary task for any organization moving to the cloud.  This is no different than if you were managing on-premises applications and infrastructure. So, how should you monitor in an AWS environment?  One choice is to use Amazon CloudWatch, which monitors CPU, memory, and disk usage and notifies you when a predetermined threshold is exceeded.  Plus, you can set up your own metrics to monitor various items such as application logs.

The best part about Amazon CloudWatch is that it’s a service provided by AWS itself.  It has a high affinity with Amazon EC2 and other AWS services, so it can quickly respond to frequent functional extensions and specification changes, and can easily support AWS Auto Scaling, which automatically increases or decreases resources according to the load.  Amazon CloudWatch provides precise monitoring tailored to each environment’s unique circumstances.

Amazon CloudWatch implementation challenges

While Amazon CloudWatch is an ideal fit for organizations with experienced cloud engineers and DevOps teams, there are some things the average users should be aware of.

Amazon CloudWatch is effective for monitoring an organization’s AWS environment, but it requires a certain level of skill and knowledge to configure and deploy.  Especially when you set your own metrics, are setting up alerts, or taking into account Auto Scaling, the complexity increases. For example, If you’re setting up monitoring, it’s easy, but if you’re setting up email, rebooting, AutoScaling, etc., depending on the resource situation, it can be difficult.

If you want to automate the recovery process with instructions such as “restart the server when an error occurs”, you must first create a recovery scenario with an AWS Lambda script that provides a detailed description of the conditions and actions to be taken.  How familiar is your team with AWS Lambda?

The principal advantage of Amazon CloudWatch is that you can monitor your environment closely, but in order to do that, you must properly design in advance for each system what items to monitor and when, threshold values, etc.  These design tasks can take a lot of time.  Of course, your mission-critical systems need to be closely monitored in this way, but this level of detail and sophistication is not appropriate for all systems. For some, such as internal websites or WordPress servers, you will want to minimize your operating and labor costs. In such cases, we would like to suggest you consider a tool that can be more easily operated and managed.

For mission-critical applications, you need high availability protection with SIOS clustering software. Add SIOS DataKeeper software to a Windows Server Failover Clustering environment to create a SANless cluster in Amazon EC2 that fails over across availability zones and regions.  Use SIOS Protection Suite for Linux for application-aware clustering designed to simplify complexity and orchestrate failover according to application-specific best practices.

 Contact the SIOS availability experts today to learn more about achieving maximum uptime for your mission-critical applications.

Reproduced from SIOS

Managing Alert-Stress for AWS EC2 with SIOS AppKeeper

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Managing Alert-Stress for AWS EC2 with SIOS AppKeeper

Managing Alert-Stress for AWS EC2 with SIOS AppKeeperHas this ever happened to you? You receive an alert about an application issue when you are out of the office, and you don’t have the information you need to address it? And you either need to access your cloud management console from an inconvenient location or pass the information on to another colleague to address? Or you are investigating an alert when another one comes in requiring your attention? Research has shown it can take the average person 23 minutes to recover from unexpected interruptions.

With companies moving to the cloud and having to manage more complex computing environments, this “alert stress” is starting to take a toll on workers’ productivity and mental health. Cloud monitoring solutions are trying to give you more information so you can resolve issues faster, but the depth of information they provide and the volume of alerts can be overwhelming.

Is Application Performance Management for AWS Enough?

Migrating to an AWS cloud infrastructure means that you often have to adopt new ways of managing and monitoring your applications. You can take advantage of AWS’s native cloud management functionality for your EC2 environment. But many companies quickly outgrow the functionality of these tools and deploy commercial Application Performance Management (APM) solutions for wider coverage and deeper insights.

But here’s the thing. These sophisticated APM solutions can be creating more work for you.  Yes, they often come with alert notification workflows to put the right information into the right person’s hands quickly.  But they do very little to fix the situation without manual intervention. The result: lots of stress-inducing alerts needing your immediate attention.

That’s why we created SIOS AppKeeper. It is the industry’s first out-of-the-box solution to automatically respond to service outages on Amazon EC2 instances. AppKeeper allows companies to protect applications from service interruptions and downtime while eliminating the need for costly and time-consuming manual intervention.

AppKeeper Automatically Restarts Failed Services in AWS EC2

SIOS AppKeeper not only identifies and sends notifications for failures. But it will also automatically attempt to restart failed services or reboot the instance if necessary. Our users have found that AppKeeper automatically addresses almost 85% of the application service failures that occur.  Without having to disrupt you, your I.T. or Development team or third-parties.

SIOS customers and partners in Japan have been using SIOS AppKeeper since 2017 to protect their AWS environments. ForgeVision is an AWS Advanced Consulting partner, integrates AppKeeper into its cloud management console. It has been allowing it to monitor and recover customers’ failures more cost-effectively. And AppKeeper is allowing Hobby Japan, a publishing company in Tokyo, to create a maintenance-free, low-cost environment.

We invite you to learn more about SIOS AppKeeper by watching this short video or by signing up to use AppKeeper for free until June 30th.

Then you can see for yourself what it’s like to have systems failures in AWS EC2 automatically addressed.

– Daisuke Yoshioka, Manager, Business Development for SIOS AppKeeper.

 

DataKeeper Cluster Edition for SQL Server High Availability In AWS Cloud

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The potential cost savings of moving to the cloud is nearly impossible not to consider. However, after you stop counting the money you are going to save, you start thinking about things like security and availability and wonder whether the cloud is for you. But fear not, we’ve got just the right solution – SIOS Datakeeper Cluster Edition.

In a traditional data center, you have the control and can deploy whatever security and high availability solution you like. However, once you decide to move your servers to the cloud your choices can become much more limited. It doesn’t matter whether you’re with Amazon, Google or Microsoft, outages in the cloud can and do occur and you need to do whatever you can to mitigate such risks.

Amazon Web Services

Let’s take a closer look at Amazon Web Services (AWS) for instance. What are the options you have to ensure that your SQL Server database can survive an unexpected outage? While some applications can be deployed in a load balanced configuration across multiple availability zones, SQL Server is generally not deployed in a load balanced configuration. What this means is that SQL Server itself resides in a single availability zone and if that zone should become unavailable, your whole application stack can come to a grinding halt.

SQL Server 2008 R2 and its limitations

If you read this article by Miles Ward, you will see that with SQL Server 2008 R2, your availability options are pretty limited. In that article on page 11, there is a nice chart that lays out your HA options. As you will see, the options are severely limited and mostly fall outside of the category which would be described as HA. Log shipping, mirroring and transactional replication are pretty much the only options you have, and they are more of a data protection options rather than HA options. If you want Microsoft failover clustering, you will find yourself out of luck due to some network limitations (clients can’t connect to a clustered IP address) in AWS and the lack of a shared disk resource required for traditional SQL clusters.

AWS

If you are looking to deploy SQL Server 2012, your options get a little better. As described by Jeremy Peschka, with a little manual intervention you can deploy AlwaysOn Availability Groups in AWS to do asynchronous replication from your data center to AWS, or even between AWS availability groups. Of course this assumes you have the SQL 2012 Enterprise license required for AlwaysOn Availability Groups. The only “issue” is that AWS really doesn’t support moving cluster IP address from one server to another, so client redirection has to be done manually using the ec2-unassign-private-ip-addresses and ec2-assign-private-ip-addresses commands after switchover that Peschka describes in his article. All-in-all this is a very manual process, which again does not really fit the description of a highly available system.

A Solution To The Limitations

If you can live without automated recovery and with the limitations of AlwaysOn Availability Groups that I described in a previous blog post, then you might just want to go ahead and try the AlwaysOn Availability Group deployment in AWS. However, if you are looking for an easier, more affordable, more robust HA solution, I have some really good news. SIOS Technology Corp has been looking at this problem and has developed a solution that overcomes all of the limitations previously described and will be available as an AMI for easy deployment. This solution is currently in private beta, but will be widely available later this year.

SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition

The SIOS solution is based on SQL server in a Microsoft Failover Clustering using DataKeeper Cluster Edition host based replication. By using hosted based replication they have overcome the first obstacle of clustering in EC2 – lack of shared storage. The second obstacle that SIOS had to overcome was the issue of client redirection described by Peschka; the client access point needs to be manipulated from within EC2, not failover clustering. SIOS has built intelligence into their AMI solution such that the reassigning of the IP address is automated as part of the cluster failover process, effectively simulating the behavior you would normally expect from a cluster.

And because all of this is built on top of failover clustering, this can be deployed using SQL 2008/2008 R2 or 2012. Even the Standard Edition of SQL Server will support a 2-node cluster so the cost savings vs. deploying SQL 2012 AlwaysOn Availability groups could be substantial.

Let me know what you think. Does SIOS Datakeeper Cluster Edition sound interesting? What are you doing today to ensure the availability of your SQL Server EC2 instances?

Reproduced with permission from https://clusteringformeremortals.com/2013/01/11/sql-server-high-availability-in-aws-cloud/