AWS CloudWatch Metrics
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon.com that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms to individuals, companies and governments, on a paid subscription basis with a free-tier option available for 12 months. The technology allows subscribers to have at their disposal a full-fledged virtual cluster of computers, available all the time, through the internet. AWS Cloudwatch custom metrics are available through the InfluxData Telegraf plugin.
Telegraf Input Plugin: AWS CloudWatch
AWS CloudWatch is Amazon’s own built-in infrastructure monitoring tool that allows you to monitor AWS cloud resources and the applications you run on AWS. You can collect AWS CloudWatch metrics and graph statistics with this Telegraf plugin and store them in your InfluxDB instance. This plugin uses a credential chain for Authentication with the CloudWatch API endpoint.
The AWS CloudWatch metrics help to manage all of your AWS servers and make sure that everything is tracked properly. By gaining more insights through CloudWatch metrics, you can monitor Amazon Web Services. CloudWatch metrics give insights to utility, app performance, and overall health of your AWS instance, and when you marry this with all your other business, infrastructure, and application metrics you collect across your entire environments, you get a complete picture of what is happening with your solutions.
Telegraf Output Plugin: AWS CloudWatch
This plugin will send metrics to AWS CloudWatch. This plugin uses a credential chain for Authentication with the CloudWatch API endpoint. For this output plugin to function correctly, the following variables must be configured: region (the Amazon region that you wish to connect to) and namespace (the namespace used for AWS CloudWatch metrics). By correctly configuring these variables, AWS CloudWatch will receive metrics and gather insights from that point.
AWS CloudWatch Basics
AWS CloudWatch is a web service that provides real-time monitoring to Amazon’s EC2 customers on their resource utilization such as CPU, disk and network. CloudWatch does not provide any memory, disk space, or load average metrics without running additional software on the instance.
With CloudWatch, you can monitor your Amazon Web Services resources and the applications you run on AWS in real time. AWS CloudWatch Events can send system events from AWS resources to AWS Lambda functions, Amazon SNS topics, streams in Amazon Kinesis, and other target types. CloudWatch Logs can monitor, store, and access your log files from Amazon EC2 instances, AWS CloudTrail, or other sources.
AWS and InfluxData
Amazon Web Services partners with InfluxData. To see other partners of Influx Data, see this page. If you’re interested in becoming a partner, register now.