AWS – SQS Monitoring

AWS SQS Monitoring is a key part of Instana’s comprehensive Amazon Web Services Monitoring solution. The Simple Queue Service (AWS SQS) is an Amazon hosted message queueing service that provides cloud computing as a package to their cloud customers and as an individual service. In terms of API, SQS has available SDKs in a number of the most popular languages, including Java, PHP, and Ruby. The messaging service itself is distributed and guaranteed to deliver any given message composed of an unrestricted data type at least once, as well as providing authentication through the user’s AWS account. Users can delete messages using receipts sent in concert with each message log.

After deployment into a client environment, Instana will automatically map out the entire infrastructure and identify how the different technologies are interacting with one another with its Dynamic Graph back-end model.

Instana’s AWS SQS Monitoring Sensor automatically collects the specific metrics relevant to AWS SQS performance and begins collecting them immediately. As a messaging queuing service, SQS must be able to efficiently operate with both the sending and the receiving systems, which in turn depend on SQS to communicate. The entire system is managed as part of Instana’s AI Powered Applicatoin Monitoring solution.

Some of the performance metrics collected are:

• Messages Delayed
• Messages Invisible/Visible
• Messages Sent

Please see Instana’s documentation page for more details.

In addition to automatically configuring for performance metrics, Instana also automatically configures for key performance indicators of AWS SQS’ actual health in real-time. This health state will be persisted to Instana’s UI as color-coded indicators of healthy, sick, or failing. Typical KPIs of SQS health would be:

• Message Creation Time
• Message Retention Time
• Visibility Timeout

Users can configure rules that define healthy bounds within which they expect SQS to operate. For example, Instana will raise an alert if SQS’ message creation time is taking longer than the stated rule calling, for example, two milliseconds.