Meet Accumulus — A Tool to Simplify Your AWS Lambda View
Accumulus is an easy, free-to-use, open-source tool for developers that need a way to assess and compare their AWS Lambda functions.
AWS and Serverless Architecture Overview
Managing servers carries the weight of operational overhead on development teams. A lot must be considered in terms of scalability and maintenance.
The introduction of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) serverless product line, solves this problem by allowing developers to rapidly attain and manage production applications while also abstracting away the underlying DevOps.
In particular, AWS Lambda provides a model for harnessing AWS’ functional compute instances without worrying about EC2 management. Lambda allows for instant server provisioning, scalability, and high availability from regions across the world. Additionally, with Lambda, overhead costs are “pay-as-you-go”, offering an alternative to the standard pay-by-the-second cost model with traditional managed servers.
Something’s missing
Currently, tools for monitoring AWS Lambda functions like AWS Cloudwatch require tedious configuration of search queries to create graphs for visualizing function metrics and logs. As time passes, the list of Lambda functions can grow, creating unnecessary difficulty in getting a quick glance into the performance of one or many functions simultaneously.
Enter Accumulus
Accumulus seeks to improve this experience for developers. Accumulus is a free, open-source tool for getting quick updates on a user’s AWS Lambda function metrics and logs. Instead of spending time navigating through existing difficult-to-use tools, try Accumulus as an alternative to simplify the experience.
Accumulus can monitor metrics such as Invocations, Duration, and Throttles. It can also display error logs as well as track operation costs. Data can be viewed in configurable time periods, ranging from 1 hour to 1 week, for four North American AWS regions: Ohio, Virginia, California, and Oregon.
How to Get Started
- Start by visiting https://accumulus.dev/
- Click “Get Started”
- If you are an existing user, log in with your email and password.
- For new users, click “Register” to create a new user account.
- Follow the instructions for registration.
- A CloudFormation stack will be created, which will return an output ARN needed for registration.
- This ARN identifies a newly-created role that Accumulus has permission to use, granting access to read data. Accumulus is unintrusive, and cannot write or update any data from this role.
How to Demo the tool
Don’t have an AWS account with Lambda functions? No worries, log in with:
- Email: email@gmail.com
- Password: password
This preconfigured demo account has Lambda functions set up for a demo.
Lambda Function Monitoring
Dashboard View
After logging in or creating an account, you are greeted by the Dashboard. The Dashboard provides an insightful glance into data aggregated from all functions of a specified region and time period. This can be helpful if a user wants a general overview of how the region’s functions are doing as a whole.
Change the time period by clicking on one of the buttons to the left:
The sync button can refresh the page to reflect the most recent data:
Functions View
To get a more in-depth view of one or many functions, navigate to the Functions page. Select functions and time period using the buttons to the left to configure the graphs
Memory View
Navigate to the Memory page for insights on allocated memory for each Lambda function. Functions that are over-allocated with 80% free space are listed. These are functions that may be eligible for a tune up in allocation settings. We highly recommend checking out another great open-source tool, the AWS Lambda Power Tuning, to optimize your functions’ computing power and cost.
How to Contribute
Developers that wish to contribute are welcome! You can find the GitHub repository here.
Found a bug? Please submit an issue here.
If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out to the team directly!
