Monitoring AWS Lambda with ManageEngine Applications Manager
As businesses increasingly move to serverless architectures, AWS Lambda is the go-to solution for developing scalable, intuitive applications. Although AWS Lambda simplifies deployment and scaling, it also introduces a new layer of complexity when it comes to monitoring and troubleshooting.
Traditional monitoring tools aren’t built to track ephemeral functions that run for a few milliseconds. You need real-time insights into every invocation, execution metric, and dependency across thousands of functions. This is where ManageEngine Applications Manager enters, providing you with the visibility you need.
Why monitoring AWS Lambda is different
Monitoring AWS Lambda is different from monitoring a traditional Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance or container. Here's how:
Short-lived executions: Functions may run for just a few milliseconds, leaving a very small window to capture metrics.
No underlying server: There’s no persistent CPU, memory, or disk usage to track in the traditional sense.
High concurrency: Thousands of functions can be invoked simultaneously, making log-based monitoring chaotic.
Complex triggers: AWS Lambda functions are often triggered by Amazon API Gateway, DynamoDB streams, Simple Storage Service (S3) uploads, CloudWatch events, and more.
You need a solution that understands this dynamic environment, and Applications Manager does exactly that.
What Applications Manager offers for AWS Lambda monitoring
Applications Manager offers out-of-the-box AWS Lambda monitoring that gives you a clear view of:
Function performance.
Invocation behavior.
Failures and exceptions.
Trigger activity.
Dependency tracking.
Its core capabilities include:
Monitoring invocation patterns
Applications Manager tracks every invocation with precision, capturing how frequently your AWS Lambda functions run, how long they take, whether they’re throttled, and if they return errors.
This visibility isn’t just about numbers. It helps you spot usage trends, identify sudden anomalies, and understand execution behavior in real time. Whether you’re looking at the spikes per minute or sustained hourly throughput, you’ll know exactly when and how your functions are being utilized.
Real-time latency and response time tracking
When it comes to serverless environments, the execution time matters. Even a delay of a few seconds can trigger timeouts or slow down dependent services. Applications Manager highlights the average and peak duration for each function and flags any unusual trends. It also shows the latency introduced by downstream calls to services like DynamoDB or external APIs. So, when something that usually runs in 100 milliseconds suddenly stretches to three seconds, you get alerted instantly.
Tracking asynchronous delivery failures
Applications Manager helps you detect post-invocation issues like failed deliveries in asynchronous AWS Lambda executions. It tracks dead-letter queue errors when retries fail and monitors destination delivery failures caused by permission or service issues. This visibility helps you catch silent failures across event-driven workflows before they escalate.
Insights into concurrency and throttling
Every AWS Lambda environment operates within concurrency limits. Hit those, and you start losing executions. Applications Manager keeps tabs on concurrent function activity and throttling incidents, giving you prompt warnings when your instances are approaching those thresholds.
With clear metrics on both account-level and function-level limits, you can optimize your concurrency settings and avoid unplanned slowdowns.
A unified view across AWS services
Monitoring AWS Lambda in isolation won’t cut it. Applications Manager brings all your AWS services—EC2, Relational Database Service, S3, Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS Lambda—onto one centralized dashboard. You can view metrics side by side, correlate trends across services, and even track regional performance or billing anomalies. This kind of holistic insight is what turns monitoring into a strategy, not just a reaction.
Proactive monitoring with smart alerts and reports
With Applications Manager, alerts aren’t just about crossing thresholds; they’re about staying ahead. You can configure rules for errors, execution times, or throttling events. The smart reporting system also generates historical reports for audits and long-term performance reviews. Plus, with AI-based anomaly detection baked in, it flags deviations in performance automatically so your team can act before users even notice something’s off.
Getting started on AWS Lambda monitoring with Applications Manager
Setting up AWS Lambda monitoring in Applications Manager is quick:
Add your AWS account into Applications Manager with IAM access.
Enable AWS Lambda monitoring in the cloud monitor configuration.
Applications Manager can automatically discover all your AWS Lambda functions and start collecting metrics.
Set up custom dashboards, alerts, and reports based on your requirements.
No agents. No instrumentation. No extra licensing costs.
Summing up
Serverless computing with AWS Lambda offers massive scalability and cost-efficiency—but only if you can see what’s happening under the hood. Without the right monitoring, even small issues like a misconfigured trigger or a mismanaged loop can snowball into major outages.
With Applications Manager, you get an all-in-one tool to monitor, analyze, and optimize your AWS Lambda workloads alongside the rest of your AWS infrastructure. It’s real-time observability, simplified—just the way serverless computing was meant to be.
Ready to monitor AWS Lambda like a pro? Start your free, 30-day trial of Applications Manager and take control of your serverless environment today.