Integrate Amazon CloudWatch and MetricFire

To integrate Amazon CloudWatch and MetricFire, reach out to MetricFire. Book a demo with the MetricFire team to discuss integrating Amazon CloudWatch and MetricFire, and see how that benefits your monitoring system.

MetricFire is a full-scale platform that offers infrastructure, system, and application monitoring using a suite of open-source monitoring tools. The platform allows you to use either Prometheus- or Graphite-as-a-Service and have your metrics displayed on aesthetically-pleasing Grafana dashboards. 

MetricFire offers its users a complete ecosystem of end-to-end infrastructure monitoring, which is made up of three of the most popular open-source monitoring software services: Prometheus, Graphite, and Grafana. As well, plugins for a number of other open-source projects are preconfigured, such as StatsD, collectd, and Kubernetes. You get all these within a hosted environment as a single product. Not only does MetricFire fit well into the infrastructure monitoring use-case, such as network monitoring and server monitoring, we also do application monitoring and business intelligence.

Through this hosted environment, MetricFire works to boost the unique features of the open source projects to give you more functionality than the original products. Below are some of the MetricFire features at a glance: 

Cloud and on Premise Monitoring

Hosted Prometheus

Hosted Graphite

Grafana Dashboards

Whether to use Prometheus or Graphite is a great question. We’ve looked deeper into this decision in our blog article, Prometheus or Graphite. While Prometheus is a newer software that has a multidimensional data structure, Graphite is robust and sufficient. The key thing to remember is that Hosted Graphite by MetricFire is more than just Graphite. Our Hosted Graphite product actually adds data dimensionality and better data storage.

The benefits of MetricFire are:

No vendor lock-ins
MetricFire allows you to request for a full export at any time, because you will always own the data you input. You get all the benefits of an open-source tool with the stability and security of a SaaS tool. 
      

Easy Budgeting
A structured pricing model allows you to save time and work within your budget. The predictability and transparent pricing allows you to keep your costs in check and plan for the future.
       

Transparency
MetricFire works transparently on all aspects of their operations of SaaS system monitoring. You can see their own internal system metrics at their public status page.
      

Robust Support
Technical support is provided by engineers for engineers, so you can expect detailed and relevant answers to your queries. 

Amazon CloudWatch is a management and monitoring service designed for AWS and other infrastructure resources or on-premises applications. It is the official metrics monitoring tool for Amazon Web Services. Using CloudWatch, you can access all your performance and operational metrics in a single platform, helping you overcome the challenge of monitoring multiple systems. CloudWatch helps you monitor your entire stack — including applications, infrastructure, and services — thus freeing up valuable resources to allow you to focus on building applications.

You can use CloudWatch Container Insights to monitor and troubleshoot your applications and microservices. CloudWatch collects, aggregates, and summarizes computer utilization information; like CPU and memory usage, network data history, and also monitoring diagnostic information. Container Insights provides you with details about container management services, such as: Amazon ECS for Kubernetes (EKS), Amazon's Elastic Container Service (ECS), etc.

The brilliant thing about Amazon Cloudwatch is that it is your gatekeeper to data and metrics for all your Amazon applications and services. However, monitoring more than the standard set of metrics can become very expensive with CloudWatch. CloudWatch custom metrics are very expensive and they should be used sparingly. For example, if a company is monitoring their AWS systems with the standard CloudWatch dashboards, it might cost around 1000 USD a month. However, if you’re monitoring hundreds of thousands of metrics related to a new launch, AWS CloudWatch could quickly rack up to 50,000 USD a month.

That's why it's such a vital integration point for MetricFire. MetricFire treats all metrics the same, so if you’re monitoring thousands of specialized metrics, you’ll still pay the same basic rate for those metrics. CloudWatch can be integrated with MetricFire, so you can pull your AWS metrics into the MetricFire platform. Then, you can get low-cost metrics scaling, while still being able to monitor your AWS metrics all in a single pane of glass. MetricFire's advanced filtering lets you choose only the data views you want to see and discard the rest. You can also set up simple rules to discard data you no longer need to keep, plus receive alerts via email or Slack.

To integrate Amazon CloudWatch and MetricFire with your monitoring system, sign up for a free trial with MetricFire. Talk with the MetricFire team about how to integrate Amazon CloudWatch and MetricFire, and get Amazon CloudWatch interacting with your MetricFire dashboards in minutes.