Tools for Analysis

A variety of third-party tools are available to assist with application analysis functions such as performance monitoring and error tracking. Several of these tools have been integrated with the AWS implementations of Kill Bill. This document identifies these integrations and provides some information you will need to put them to use. This discussion applies to the AWS single-tier and multi-tier implementations. The CloudFormation implementation is not discussed here because it is automatically bundled with CloudWatch.

To proceed, you should have a working Kill Bill implementation running on AWS, using either the single-tier or multi-tier installation options. The single-tier option runs Kill Bill, Kaui, the MariaDB database, and the nginx load balancer on a single AWS EC2 instance. This is suitable for quick deployment and for testing and development. The multi-tier option runs Kill Bill and Kaui on two or more separate EC2 instances, and uses an AWS RDS database manager along with an AWS load balancer. This is an attractive option for many production uses.

You should be running Kill Bill version 2021.9 or later. This version can be configured to provide metrics and error information to each of the analysis tools discussed here. If you open the Kill Bill admin page in your browser, it should show that you are running the "Kill Bill Premium edition":

If you see this page you are ready to go. If not, you should upgrade your installation.

Performance monitoring enables you to analyze a variety of metrics that provide information on the operation of Kill Bill and Kaui along with the environment in which they run. Metrics can be graphed over time and collected in displays called Dashboards. Kill Bill collects over 1000 such metrics. AWS Kill Bill includes a framework for simple integration with the following performance monitoring tools:

Datadog and New Relic offer similar analysis capabilities and can easily be integrated with the single-tier and multi-tier AWS implementations of Kill Bill. CloudWatch is an AWS service that is automatically included with CloudFormation implementations, and may be integrated with the other implementations as well.

Error Tracking is an important part of managing your Kill Bill system. When warnings and errors are logged, whether due to system bugs or user mistakes, error tracking tools enable you to recognize and classify them, analyze what went wrong, fix the immediate problem, and develop ways to avoid similar errors in the future. AWS Kill Bill provides easy integration with the following error tracking tools:

Integration of tools generally requires only two simple steps: Editing a few lines in a configuration file, and in some cases, installing an agent program using a simple command line script. For details on the installation of each specific tool, follow the links above.