OPS 1: How do you effectively monitor and manage the operational health of a multi-tenant environment?

Multi-tenant environments rely on robust operational tools that enable tenant-aware views into the overall activity and health of their systems. By adding tenant consumption, activity, and health trends to the system’s operational experience, SaaS teams are able to more effectively capture, profile, and assess the health trends of tenant and tenant tiers.

Resources

AWS re:Invent 2017: GPS: SaaS Monitoring - Creating a Unified View of Multi-tenant Health featuring New Relic (GPSTEC309)
GPSTEC309-SaaS Monitoring Creating a Unified View of Multi-tenant Health featuring New Relic Slides

Best Practices:

• Include tenant context into application logs: Operational tools aggregate log activity, enabling operations teams to inspect the health and activity of the system, individual tenants, and tenant tiers.

• Use purpose-built, tenant-aware tools to enable proactive management of tenant workloads: Use tools to provide detailed tenant operational data to enable operations teams to analyze and evaluate activity, consumption, and health through the lens of tenants and tiers. These tools enable the implementation of proactive policies and alarms.

• Collect detailed tenant insights: Instrumentation is added to the SaaS application, enabling it to emit a collection of detailed tenant insights that enable detailed operational analysis of tenant activity, health, and consumption trends. Operations teams leverage business intelligence (BI) tools to analyze this tenant-infused data.

Improvement Plan

Include tenant context into application logs

Instrument application logs with tenant context

• Introduce a wrapper around your logging framework that acquires the tenant context and injects this context into each log message. Embed any key tenant attributes that are valuable in an operational context.
• Include a tenant identifier and, if possible, a user-friendly tenant name in log messages to make it easier for operational teams to associate log entries with specific tenants.

Use this tenant context to streamline the operational experience, allowing administrators to analyze logs with tenant context with log analytics tools.

Use search solutions to analyze tenant trends, leveraging solutions, such as Amazon OpenSearch Service/Kibana or Amazon Athena, to explore the log data.

Use purpose-built, tenant-aware tools to enable proactive management of tenant workloads

Create a multi-tenant aware dashboard

• Use Amazon QuickSight or third-party BI tools to create custom multi-tenant aware dashboards that allow operations teams to easily create views of tenant activity, trends, consumption, errors, and so on. Make tenant and tenant attributes first-class citizens in the operational experience.
• Build analytics into your operational experience, enabling teams to dynamically analyze tenant workloads based on tenant insights and key tenant attributes, such as tier and role.
  AWS re:Invent 2017: GPS: SaaS Monitoring - Creating a Unified View of Multi-tenant Health featuring New Relic (GPSTEC309)

Enable operations to configure tenant alerts and alarms

Identify specific patterns of tenant consumption, activity, and SLA metrics that can be combined and used to proactively identify tenant health issues.

Identify specific patterns of tenant consumption, activity, and SLA metrics that can be combined and used to proactively identify tenant health issues.

Configure alerts and alarms that are triggered when tenants reach specific health states or performance thresholds that might be a precursor to a reliability issue.

Collect detailed tenant insights

Publish insights that enhance the operational views of tenant workloads

• Instrument your application with detailed tenant activity, usage, and consumption metrics to shape the operational agility and efficiency.
• Add metrics that provide a view of tenant latency, potential bottlenecks, and feature consumption to allow administrators to effectively analyze and manage multi-tenant workloads.
• Augment tenant custom metrics with AWS metrics, enabling operators to have a unified view of tenant and system activity.

Aggregate tenant metric insights to enable historical analysis of trends and provide insights to shape future architectural and operational strategies.