Serverless monitoring tools need to address unique observability challenges. Applications in the cloud give you something great: less infrastructure to worry about, automatic scaling, and you only pay for what you use. It's like outsourcing half your sysadmin headaches.
But then you deploy your first AWS Lambda function, Google Cloud Function, or Azure Function, and you're staring into a black box. Your code runs... somewhere. How's it doing? Your traditional monitoring solutions suddenly feel useless - like trying to catch smoke with a fishing net.
Architecture in the cloud breaks conventional monitoring approaches. You no longer have persistent servers to SSH into or physical network devices you can ping directly. Instead, you're dealing with:
This event-driven, distributed setup makes tracking application performance, latency, and user experience much harder. Without specialized tools, you're flying blind, relying on users to tell you when something breaks.
Cloud providers hide the infrastructure you need for proper observability. Your cloud provider (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure) owns everything and hides much of what you'd normally track. You can't just install an agent on a VM and call it a day.
That's why these environments need different monitoring approaches:
PRTG connects to all your environments at once. While cloud-native tools like CloudWatch provide basic metrics, they fall short when you need a combined view of multiple AWS accounts, on-premises equipment, or more detailed views of your applications.
PRTG Network Monitor gives you a single monitoring platform that:
PRTG's flexibility lets it work with many data sources and ingest telemetry from your workloads. For AWS applications, this means accessing APIs to get logs and metrics from CloudWatch and other AWS services.
Let's look at common problems and how PRTG helps solve them with practical use cases.
Problem: Customers report slow responses, but CloudWatch logs are overwhelming. You suspect cold starts or long function runtimes in your Lambda functions.
How PRTG Helps:
PRTG can monitor AWS Lambda metrics through CloudWatch REST API Sensors or HTTP Sensors to pull key metrics from your AWS environment:
Quick How-To:
Problem: Your serverless apps rely heavily on API Gateway. You need to ensure it responds quickly and remains error-free for optimal user experience.
How PRTG Helps:
PRTG can check your API Gateway's performance two ways:
Q: How does monitoring in these environments differ from traditional server monitoring?
A: You're monitoring functions, not machines. With traditional servers, you track CPU, RAM, disk I/O, and network traffic. In the cloud, you care about:
Q: Does PRTG include distributed tracing for applications?
A: PRTG works with your tracing tools for end-to-end visibility. While PRTG isn't a dedicated tracing tool like OpenTelemetry or AWS X-Ray, it can collect and display important metrics from these services. You can set up PRTG sensors to pull:
Q: What are "custom metrics" in this context?
A: Custom metrics are your business-specific measurements. These are application-specific measurements you define for your applications, such as:
PRTG can ingest and display these custom metrics, giving you better insight beyond standard invocation and error rates.
Serverless applications in the cloud offer great agility but need specialized monitoring solutions. Cloud-native tools alone create blind spots and frustrating debugging experiences.
PRTG Network Monitor gives you the complete picture of your environments with:
Your DevOps teams can spot bottlenecks before users do, troubleshoot issues faster, and optimize performance across cloud-native and on-premises infrastructure.
Stop reacting to outages in your applications and start preventing them with PRTG.
Want to take control of your environment? Try PRTG Network Monitor free for 30 days and see how proper monitoring tools transform your operations.