👀Additional observability

We can go full monty and add better, richer observability tooling when we feel like we've outgrown the AWS standard tooling.

Honeycomb is a next-generation observability-focused solution. Honeycomb or a similar solution could be bolted on as an addition if you want some more bells and whistles beyond what AWS provides. Many modern observability tools are based on the OpenTelemetry standard, making a choice basing itself on that standard a fairly future-proof decision.

Read about OpenTelemetry here.

If you want to toy with Honeycomb, look no further than their playground.

If you want to try Honeycomb with this project, it's pretty easy if we use their Lambda extension:

1. Get a free (generous!) Honeycomb account.

2. When you have the account set up and are logged in, get an API key (it's enough that it can send events and create datasets). See the docs for more details.

3. Modify the provided logger as per below, since the regular console.log() does not seem to work correctly with Honeycomb.

4. Modify serverless.yml, uncommenting and adding your values to the environment variables LIBHONEY_DATASET and LIBHONEY_API_KEY (lines 37-38). Note: Ideally these are encrypted or stored in a secrets manager, but for this project, let's just do it this way.

5. Deploy the stack.

6. Add the Honeycomb Lambda integration layer by running sh honeycomb-layer.sh (ensure the values correspond with your values first!).

7. Ready to go! You should see data coming into Honeycomb shortly if you start using your live endpoints.

Setting up Bunyan as a logger

You might want to use Bunyan rather than our custom logger if the logs don't quite show up structured the way we output them.

Install bunyan and its typings with npm install bunyan @types/bunyan.

Open up src/FakeUser/frameworks/Logger.ts and add this to the top of the file:

src/FakeUser/frameworks/Logger.ts

import bunyan from "bunyan";
const log = bunyan.createLogger({ name: "better-apis-workshop" });

For the log(), warn() and error() methods, change the existing console.log()-dependent implementation lines to:

• log.info(createdLog);

• log.warn(createdLog);

• log.error(createdLog);

Lastly, in the createLog() method, go ahead and remove the level field, as bunyan adds that itself.

Now you can use Bunyan instead of regular console.log() or our own custom one!