Datomic Cloud Documentation

Monitoring

AWS CloudWatch provides a powerful set of tools for monitoring a software system running on AWS:

  • You can collect and track CloudWatch Metrics – variables that measure the behavior of your system.
  • You can configure CloudWatch Alarms to notify operations or take other automated steps when potential problems arise.
  • You can monitor, store, and search CloudWatch Logs across all your AWS resources.
  • You can create CloudWatch Dashboards that provide a single overview for monitoring your systems.

Datomic is fully integrated with all of these AWS monitoring tools. On the producing side, Datomic creates metrics and logs; and on the consuming side, Datomic organizes metrics in custom dashboards. This document shows how to manage and monitor your Datomic system.

Finding Datomic Resources by Tag

Datomic tags resources it creates with the following tag:

Tag Name Tag Value Resources Tagged
datomic:system System Name all taggable resources

You can use this tag to locate all the resources associated with a Datomic system. From the Tag Editor:

  1. Under Regions, Enter one or more AWS regions
  2. Under Resource types, choose "All resource types"
  3. Under Tags, choose the name "datomic:system" for tag key
  4. Under the same row in Tags, enter a specific System Name for tag value, or leave the tag value blank to find resources for all Datomic Systems.

find-resources-to-tag.png

Searching CloudWatch Logs

CLI Tool

The CLI Tools allow you to list log messages and show detail for specific messages without necessitating a trip to the AWS console.

AWS Console

If you need to view the CloudWatch Logs for a Datomic system:

  • Open the CloudWatch Logs in the AWS Console
  • Click on the Log Group named "datomic-{System}", where System is your system name

Each EC2 instance will create a separate log stream. Usually you will want to search across all log streams:

  • click the "Search Log Group" button
  • click to the right of the filter box to choose an appropriate time window
  • enter a metric filter pattern to scope your search
  • Finding Alerts

    The search pattern "Alert - Alerts" will find the text of every alert produced by Datomic. The "Alert" matches each alert, and the "- Alerts" filters redundant summary messages.

    The example below demonstrates reviewing a week's worth of alerts. The single event that matches is a transient DynamoDB request failure, so not a problem.

    search-for-alerts.png

Finding Logs By Message

  • CLI Tool

    The CLI Tools allow you to list logs between a starting time --tod and a number of minutes in the past --minutes-back.

    The datomic log list command can be piped to grep with the -B 1 option to be used to find specific logs for a given time period: 

    datomic log list my-datomic-system \
-f all --tod 2019-06-24T03:41:23.491 --minutes-back 150 \
| grep -B 1 CloudWatchMetrics

    The preceding command will find all logs labeled "CloudWatchMetrics" from March 6th, 2019, 1:11:23.491am until March 6th, 2019, 3:41:23.491am.

  • AWS Console

    The image below shows using the CloudWatch Filter and Pattern Syntax to find all logs whose Msg is "CodeDeployEvent".

    • The brackets {} identify the query as a JSON metric filter
    • the $ is a placeholder for log entry as a whole
    • the dot syntax scopes the search to the individual key Msg

    cast-event.png

Metrics Produced by Datomic Cloud

Datomic compute nodes publish Cloudwatch Metrics as follows:

  • namespace is DatomicCloud
  • dimensions are your system name and your compute stack name

Datomic reports a large number of distinct metrics, many of which are useful only for Datomic support. The most useful metrics for operators are listed below; see troubleshooting nodes for some common scenarios.

In the table below

  • {DdbOp} can be Read or Write
  • {Outcome} can be Succeeded or Failed
Metric Units Description
Alerts count number of alerts written to Cloudwatch logs
Datoms count number of datoms in a database, reported when indexer checks for work
Ddb{DdbOp}{Outcome}Msec msec latency for a ddb operation
HttpEndpointOpsPending count count is total number of requests started
HttpEndpointThrottled count requests rejected because server too busy
IndexMemMb mb total size of the in-memory indexes on a node
JvmFreeMb mb free JVM memory
NodeDbCount count number of databases being served by node
TxBatchBytes bytes number of bytes batched into a storage write
TxDatoms count number of datoms in a transaction

Note In order to reduce cost, the Solo Topology reports only a small subset of the metrics listed above: Alerts, Datoms, HttpEndpointOpsPending, JvmFreeMb, and HttpEndpointThrottled.

Logs Produced by Datomic Cloud

Datomic writes Cloudwatch Logs as follows:

  • The "Log Group" name is the name of the Datomic System.
  • Each EC instance will create a log stream named by the convention {system}-{group}-{instance-id}-{timestamp}.

Datomic Cloud Dashboards

When you launch a Datomic Cloud system, it automatically creates a dashboard named datomic-(system)-(region) that you can view in the AWS Console.

The Solo Topology creates a basic dashboard:

solo-dashboard.png

The Production Topology creates a much larger dashboard, suitable for viewing on a large ops monitor screen:

production-dashboard.png

Each dashboard widget tells a story. For example, the DynamoDB Usage widget tracks DynamoDB AutoScaling of reads (left axis) and writes (right axis). In the image below you can see DynamoDB write provisioning (the green line) scaling up for a four-hour period during a batch load, and then scaling back down to almost nothing.

ddb-autoscaling.png