SIOS AppKeeper: Automatically responding to service outages on Amazon EC2 instances

SIOS Technology, an industry pioneer in providing IT resilience through intelligent application availability, announced the availability of SIOS AppKeeper, the industry’s first out-of-the-box solution to automatically respond to service outages on Amazon EC2 instances, protecting applications from service interruptions and downtime while eliminating the need for costly and time-consuming manual intervention.

SIOS AppKeeper is immediately available with a free 14-day trial for end-users and channel partners.

Organizations adopting public cloud infrastructures are using application performance monitoring tools (APM) to alert their DevOps teams when performance changes occur, pinpointing the origin of any issue to facilitate manual remediation, but often bury users in hard-to-manage alert storms.

SIOS AppKeeper not only identifies and sends notifications for failures from an intuitive dashboard, it will also automatically attempt to restart failed services or reboot the instance – addressing 85% of application service failures. It can be used alone or with an APM tool.

SIOS AppKeeper was first introduced in the Japanese market in early 2017 by sister company Japan-based SIOS Technology and today is used by end-users, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Systems Integrators (SIs) across the APJ region to monitor and remediate AWS EC2 instance issues.

“In line with SIOS Technology, Inc.’s strategy of taking solutions successfully introduced in one market to larger, global markets, we are launching SIOS AppKeeper in the North American market,” said Nobuo Kita, Chairman, President and CEO, SIOS Technology.

According to data from SIOS’ existing customers and partners in Japan, the average customer with only three AWS EC2 instances experienced AWS EC2 instance downtime at least once a month. With SIOS AppKeeper, they were able to reduce their downtime by 90%, allowing IT personnel to focus on higher-value tasks and improving Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

SIOS AppKeeper is part of the SIOS portfolio of high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) solutions. SIOS DataKeeper and SIOS LifeKeeper clustering software provide HA and DR for critical applications and databases like SQL Server, Oracle and SAP running in physical, virtual and cloud environments.

With the rapid adoption of the cloud and hybrid cloud for both operational and business-critical applications, SIOS is extending its product line to provide more flexibility to customers and partners in balancing the level of availability with costs across all of their applications running in AWS.

“Every system and application has unique SLAs with regard to recovery times and risk tolerance and there is a need to balance costs with these SLAs. With AppKeeper, SIOS is extending its footprint in the cloud to provide greater availability and quicker recovery for those applications with higher risk tolerance and more flexible SLAs than more critical systems.

“Combined with SIOS LifeKeeper and DataKeeper HA clustering solutions, we now offer customers greater flexibility in dialing in the appropriate level of availability to balance costs with SLAs to provide the right level of availability for all of their applications,” said Michael Bilancieri, SVP, Products and Marketing, SIOS Technology.

Hobby Japan is a publishing company based in Japan with diverse businesses related to hobbies, such as anime, figures and games.

“We cannot prevent setting errors or load issues. But using SIOS AppKeeper is very good for my peace of mind. Our staff is not being called every time a system or server failure occurs,” said Fukabori Yuichiro, Public Relations, Business Administration Department, Hobby Japan.

“Our goal is to create a maintenance-free, low-cost environment and SIOS AppKeeper helps us do that.”

ForgeVision, an AWS Advanced Consulting partner, takes SIOS AppKeeper to market in Japan as part of its customer-facing cloud management console. “SIOS AppKeeper is an essential service for our AWS Operation Management Service,” said Masanori Yamaguchi, Cloud Integration Division, General Manager at ForgeVision.

“By providing SIOS AppKeeper, it is possible to monitor applications on AWS and automatically recover from failures at a reasonable price, and it is possible to provide both improved service quality and reduced operating costs to customers.”

Key capabilities of SIOS AppKeeper, include:

• Eliminate manual intervention by monitoring and proactively responding to service outages on AWS EC2 instances.
• Reduce downtime with automatic restarting of EC2 services or rebooting of instances when services become unavailable.
• Reduce costs and meet SLAs with automatic remediation of service outages.
• Easy set-up process. Setup takes only a few minutes, there is no software to install. Users simply connect to their AWS account and select which instances and services to monitor, and the level of protection they want.

Key options available with SIOS AppKeeper, include:

• Monitor and alert (default)
• Restart services
• Reboot instances
• Reboot instances only if restart of services fails