Serverless architectures are becoming increasingly popular, which has led to an increased need for solutions to the challenges of microservice observability. Observability solutions enable fast and easy debugging of applications, as well as driving optimization and cost efficiency. However, the complexity of serverless systems presents challenges to observability, and the wrong tool set can lead to unexpected costs.

In a serverless environment, not only are developers abstracted from the underlying infrastructure that runs their code, but the distributed, event-driven nature of serverless applications makes traditional approaches to monitoring and debugging ineffective. Serverless functions are often chained through asynchronous event sources such as AWS SNS, SQS, Kinesis, or DynamoDB, making tracing extremely difficult.

The distributed nature of serverless architectures makes monitoring harder, as there isn't one central, monolithic application server anymore. Instead, developers are faced with a distributed architecture and an abundance of competing tools to conduct serverless monitoring.

Serverless observability tools are purpose built to support serverless architectures. They allow developers to reap all the benefits of serverless technology without sacrificing insights into the system, allowing them to retain opportunities to catch errors and optimize for cost and responsiveness.

Building an observability solution tailored to a serverless system requires data, and a lot of it. Logs, metrics, and traces are required to ensure the system can answer as many questions as possible about how it's working, whether you're repairing or optimizing. Each source contributes a different perspective on how your application is performing and, when analyzed together, give a complete picture of its health.

There are many different serverless observability tools available, each with its own unique features and capabilities. Choosing the right one for your needs can be a daunting task. Some popular options include IOpipe, Dashbird, and Epsagon.

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