AWS Releases Amazon Lookout for Metrics

Amazon Web Services yesterday launched Amazon Lookout for Metrics, a fully managed service that detects anomalies in metrics and helps determine their root causes.

Amazon Lookout for Metrics helps businesses monitor metrics like revenue, web page views, active users, transaction volume, and mobile app installations and diagnose the root cause of anomalies like unexpected dips in revenue, high rates of abandoned shopping carts, spikes in payment transaction failures, and increases in new user sign-ups.

Companies can connect Amazon Lookout for Metrics to 19 popular data sources, including Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3), Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), and Amazon Redshift, as well as SaaS applications like Salesforce, Marketo, and Zendesk. Amazon Lookout for Metrics automatically inspects and prepares the data, selects the best suited machine learning algorithm, begins detecting anomalies, groups related anomalies together, and summarizes potential root causes. The service also ranks the anomalies by predicted severity.

Amazon Lookout for Metrics connects to notification and event services like Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), Slack, Pager Duty, and AWS Lambda, allowing customers to create customized alerts or actions like filing a trouble ticket or removing an incorrectly priced product from a retail website. As the service begins returning results, users can provide feedback on the relevancy of detected anomalies via the AWS console or the application programming interface (API), and the service uses this input to continuously improve its accuracy over time.

"From marketing and sales to telecom and gaming, customers in all industries have [key performance indicators] that they need to be able to monitor for potential spikes, dips, and other anomalies outside of normal bounds across their business functions. But catching and diagnosing anomalies in metrics can be challenging, and by the time a root cause has been determined, much more damage has been done than if it had been identified earlier," said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Amazon Machine Learning for AWS, in a statement. "We're excited to deliver Amazon Lookout for Metrics to help customers monitor the metrics that are important to their business using an easy-to-use machine learning service that takes advantage of Amazon's own experience in detecting anomalies at scale and with great accuracy and speed.";

DevFactory, Digita, Marcaide, More Retail, Slalom, and Wipro were all early users of Lookout for Metrics.

"With Lookout for Metrics, we are able to automatically monitor data across all the important categories with a few clicks and identify anomalous events in nearly 40 percent of cases that we missed earlier. By quickly identifying such cases, we are able to adjust our inventory planning and distribution across all stores in an optimal way," said Rahul Subrananiam, CEO of DevFactory, in a statement.

"For us, Amazon Lookout for Metrics is an autonomous service that provides customers with critical insights into security and business data, helping them excel in the cloud," said Manish Govil, general manager and global head of Wipro's AWS Business Group, in a statement. "Lookout for Metrics has not only reduced our development efforts, but also significantly lowered the time it takes to employ anomaly detection on customer workloads. It has also empowered us to analyze historical and continuous data streams in near real time, enabling us to find and eliminate anomalies from our customers' operational and business data. We are excited to bring this AWS service to our customers to help them achieve AI-driven business outcomes in the cloud at scale."