Problem Description

As one of America's leading marketers and servicers of credit cards, our client is growing fast and their IT department needs a way to keep track of the health and performance of their systems and infrastructure. The information is distributed across different platforms and data storages, including Snowflake repositories, Databases and Cloudwatch logs. As part of this solution, They also need an early warning system via alerts in case the health of the infrastructure is compromised.  

In addition, this client requires a monitoring solution that allows for incremental scaling as their business evolves. To meet their needs, Allata must identify a tool that ensures this level of flexibility and scalability into the future.

Solution

To accomplish this, Allata moved forward with the development of a Monitoring Dashboard to be displayed as a corridor monitoring tool that provides near real-time insights. This Dashboard exposes different metrics and KPIs around the client’s business and their infrastructure in AWS. Information about their business is stored in Snowflake and data related to the infrastructure is taken from the Amazon Cloudwatch logs. 

For this solution, Allata designed a solid architecture that allowed the application to gather the required information from different data sources.

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The selected tool to implement the solution was Grafana, due the amount of datasources connection options, plugins available and the pricing model they offer. For example, their tool includes a free tier for basic monitoring options, as well as an Advanced tier with all the required features to expand services as needed. Grafana was installed in an EC2 instance within the client’s AWS cloud environment.

The Dashboard was split in three parts:

1. Banner Metrics: A quick view panel with green/red indicators that show the general status of the applications and infrastructure.
2. Domain Metrics: Graphs containing the historic data of the business.
3. Infrastructure Metrics: Graphs containing the historic data of the health of Beanstalk, EC2 and RDS Clusters.

Benefit

Once the solution was deployed, this client was able to keep track of the health and performance of their systems and infrastructure in near real-time. The Dashboard provides information to their IT managers and technical personnel to detect a problem as soon as it arises and take quick action to correct the issue.