By: Tim Lee, Taylor Zhang, Snow Bai, and Roberto Meloni
What is Chronos?
Chronos is a free, open-source developer tool that monitors health data from servers, microservices, Kubernetes clusters, and now, AWS services.
In our technology-driven world, software engineers are encountering an ever-growing demand for consistent and reliable health monitoring of their applications. These developers must remain informed of their application’s performance, pinpoint the timing and cause of crashes, and more. This need is precisely what Chronos sought to address. As a free, open-source desktop application, Chronos tracks health data across servers, microservices, Kubernetes clusters, and containers. With the aim of being an all-encompassing monitoring tool, it caters to developers of all sorts and functions seamlessly across all platforms.
Now, Chronos has advanced another step to realize its full potential as an all-in-one monitoring tool by extending its services to the Amazon Web Services Cloud platform.
Chronos and Amazon Web Service
Since its launch in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has risen to become the veritable standard for serverless cloud architecture. Recent reports indicate that AWS commands a staggering 34% share of the cloud infrastructure market. Giants of the tech industry, such as Netflix, Pinterest, and Lyft, rely on AWS to host their websites, making them accessible to users all around the globe. With AWS holding such a large slice of the market in today’s digital landscape, any monitoring tool that claims to be all-in-one must possess the ability to gather application metrics for services that reside on the tech behemoth’s cloud platform.
And now, enter Chronos, the Swiss army knife of the monitoring world. With just a couple of lines of information and the click of a button, Chronos can monitor instances and services hosted on Amazon Web Services EC2 and ECS platforms. Working seamlessly with AWS CloudWatch, Chronos receives data from the cloud-hosted application and delivers it to the developer visually, right on the dashboard.
How Do I Use Chronos?
To utilize Chronos, begin by heading to GitHub and cloning the Chronos repository. With the installation of dependencies via npm install, you’re now ready to launch the application using the two run dev scripts.
Once you’re in the application, adding a new AWS EC2 or ECS service is a breeze. Simply specify your AWS region and access keys (and instance ID for EC2), and Chronos is now ready to connect to AWS and gather health metrics.
After successfully connecting Chronos to your AWS account, you can easily visualize those health metrics through the app’s intuitive dashboard. You’ll have access to essential metrics like CPU usage, memory usage, network traffic, and disk usage, among others.
Other Key Features
- Chronos allows for tracking the health of your microservices, Kubernetes clusters, containers, and AWS services, providing valuable insights into their performance.
- The distributed tracing feature generates graphs that display the path of a network request from start to finish, allowing for a thorough understanding of your application’s behavior.
- With support for both PostgreSQL and MongoDB databases, Chronos provides flexibility in the data sources you can monitor.
- The application displays real-time statistics on latency, speed, temperature, and memory usage, giving you up-to-date information on the health of your services.
- The rendered cards and graphs enable seamless comparison of metrics from different services, allowing you to identify performance discrepancies and patterns with ease.
- Chronos is an accessible desktop application available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux, making it a versatile tool for developers across all platforms.
With Chronos, valuable insights into your AWS applications and many others are within reach, allowing you to identify issues before they impact your customers. Whether you’re aiming to optimize performance or prevent downtime, Chronos can help you achieve your objectives.
For more information about Chronos, visit our website, or the official Chronos GitHub Page. Feel free to send any questions or comments to our email, teamchronosla@gmail.com. Thank you for supporting Chronos!
The Chronos Team
Roberto Meloni, GitHub | LinkedIn
Snow Bai, GitHub | LinkedIn
Taylor Zhang, GitHub | LinkedIn
Tim Lee, GitHub | LinkedIn
Recap: Chronos offers a dependable and all-encompassing tool for monitoring various locally hosted applications such as microservices, Kubernetes clusters, and AWS services. If you want to learn more about how to implement Chronos with these technologies, we recommend checking out our previously published articles linked below. We’re thrilled to introduce our new AWS features and hope it enhances your experience with Chronos.
Additional Reading
CHRONOS: Application Health Monitoring for the Modern Era by Josh James
Monitoring Node.js gRPC Microservices with Chronos by Derek Lam
Introducing Chronos 7 — A complete health monitoring tool for microservices, Apache Kafka clusters, servers, and containers by Hannah Santoyo