Amazon launches Lookout for Metrics, an AWS service to monitor business performance

Amazon today announced the general availability of Lookout for Metrics, a fully managed service that uses machine learning to monitor key factors impacting the health of enterprises. Launched at re:Invent 2020 last December in preview, Lookout for Metrics can now be accessed by most Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers via the AWS console and through supporting partners.

Organizations analyze metrics or key performance indicators to help their businesses run effectively and efficiently. Traditionally, business intelligence tools are used to manage this data across disparate sources, but identifying these anomalies is challenging. Traditional rule-based methods look for data that falls outside of numerical ranges. Problematically, these ranges tend to be static and unchanging in response to conditions like the time of the day, day of the week, seasons, or business cycles.

Using the same machine learning technology behind Amazon, Lookout for Metrics ostensibly solves this problem by automatically inspecting business health indicators including revenue, web page views, active users, transaction volume, and mobile app installations. The service also helps to diagnose the root cause of anomalies like unexpected dips in revenue, high rates of abandoned shopping carts, spikes in payment transaction failures, increases in new user sign-ups, and more

Customers can connect Lookout for Metrics to 19 popular data sources like Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Redshift as well as software-as-a-service apps like Salesforce, Marketo, and Zendesk. Lookout for Metrics scrapes and prepares the data, selects the best-suited machine learning algorithm, begins detecting anomalies, groups related anomalies together, and summarizes the possible causes. For example, if a customer’s website traffic dropped suddenly, Lookout for Metrics would help them  determine if an unintentional deactivation of a marketing campaign was the cause.

Lookout for Metrics also connects to notification and event services, allowing customers to create alerts or actions like filing tickets or removing an incorrectly-priced product from a retail website. As the service begins returning results, developers have the ability to provide feedback on the relevancy of detected anomalies, which the service uses to improve its accuracy.

“From marketing and sales to telecom and gaming, customers in all industries have KPIs 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,” Swami Sivasubramanian VP said in a press release. “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.”

Lookout for Metrics is initially available in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS regions. It’ll come to additional regions in the next few months, Amazon says.

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