Troubleshooting AWS Kinesis Streams

1. Monitoring Stream Metrics: Before diving into troubleshooting, it’s crucial to monitor stream metrics to gain insights into stream health and performance. AWS provides various CloudWatch metrics for Kinesis Streams, including shard-level metrics such as incoming records, outgoing records, iterator age, and more. Monitoring these metrics can help identify abnormalities or bottlenecks in data ingestion and processing.
2. Identifying Ingestion Issues: Ingestion issues may arise due to various reasons, such as throttling, connectivity issues, or data format errors. Here are some steps to identify and troubleshoot ingestion issues:
   • Check for throttling: Monitor CloudWatch metrics for PutRecord and PutRecords API calls to detect throttling events. Throttling may occur if the stream’s shard capacity is exceeded or if the client application is sending data too quickly.
   • Verify connectivity: Ensure that client applications can establish and maintain a stable connection to the Kinesis endpoint. Check network configurations, security groups, and firewall settings to rule out connectivity issues.
   • Validate data format: Ensure that data records adhere to the expected format and schema defined for the stream. Data format errors can lead to serialization or deserialization failures during ingestion.
3. Addressing Processing Bottlenecks: Processing bottlenecks may occur if consumer applications cannot keep up with the incoming data rate or if there are issues with the processing logic. Here’s how to address processing bottlenecks:
   • Monitor consumer lag: Monitor consumer application metrics to identify instances where the application falls behind in processing incoming data. Consumer lag indicates processing bottlenecks and may require scaling up resources or optimizing processing logic.
   • Scale consumer resources: If consumer applications are struggling to keep up with the data ingestion rate, consider scaling up the resources (e.g., EC2 instances, Lambda functions) used by the consumer application to increase processing capacity.
   • Optimize processing logic: Review the processing logic implemented in consumer applications to identify inefficiencies or performance bottlenecks. Optimize code, implement parallel processing, or use batch processing techniques to improve processing throughput.
4. Handling Data Retention and Scaling: Data retention and scaling issues may arise if the stream’s retention period is insufficient or if the stream needs to scale dynamically to handle increased throughput. Here’s how to handle these issues:
   • Adjust retention period: Increase the stream’s retention period if historical data needs to be retained for a longer duration. Be mindful of the additional storage costs associated with longer retention periods.
   • Scale stream capacity: Dynamically scale the stream’s capacity by adjusting the number of shards based on the incoming data rate. Use tools like AWS Auto Scaling to automate the scaling process and ensure that the stream can handle fluctuations in data volume effectively.
5. Leveraging AWS Support and Documentation: If troubleshooting data ingestion and processing issues with Kinesis Streams becomes challenging, don’t hesitate to leverage AWS Support services and consult official documentation and resources. AWS Support offers various support plans, including Developer, Business, and Enterprise support, to assist users in resolving technical issues and optimizing their use of AWS services.

Learn more on AWS Kinesis

Official Kinesis Page