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Monitoring Amazon CloudWatch with GitHub

Integrating Amazon CloudWatch and GitHub with your monitoring system

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

What is Amazon CloudWatch?

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 its 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 get started, first, create a policy that we will later attach to the user.

  1.  In the IAM Dashboard, click on Policies (on the left) or Customer Managed Policies under IAM Resources, then click on Create Policy.
  2. Switch to the JSON tab, replace the existing text with the policy provided below, and click ‘Review policy‘.
  3. Give the policy a name (Eg: HG_policy) and a description (optional).
  4. Save the policy by clicking ‘Create Policy‘.

  

Next, we’ll create a user to attach the policy. We’ll use the Access Key/Secret Key tokens to permit Hosted Graphite to import CloudWatch metric data.

  1.  In the IAM Console, click on ‘Users‘ on the left or under IAM Resources. Then select ‘Add User‘.
  2. Give the user a name (Eg: HG_addon) and ‘Programmatic access‘ for the Access type.
  3. Click ‘Next: Permissions‘ and click the ‘Attach existing policies directly‘ button at the top.
  4. Search for the policy we just created and attach it by clicking the corresponding checkbox, then press ‘Next: Review‘.
  5. Click on ‘Create User‘ and copy the Access Key and Secret Key into the relevant fields on the add-on set-up page here. Optionally, you can download a copy of this account information, but keep it safe as this information can be sensitive.

   

To enable the CloudWatch add-on, go to the add-ons page in your Hosted Graphite account and choose the option for Amazon AWS CloudWatch. From there you can select the AWS services you wish to connect with.
 
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If you have any questions about getting your AWS instances connected to Hosted Graphite, contact our team. We're happy to help you!

What is GitHub?

Visualize GitHub Events with Webhooks

MetricFire makes it easy to collect data from your repositories, and visualize GitHub events in the form of dashboard annotations. To enable our webhook integration, copy the webhook from Add-Ons => GitHub in your Hosted Graphite account:

 



github-webhook

 

Then add the webhook to your GitHub repo, in the ‘settings’ section => ‘webhooks’

 

github-webhook-config 



Now you can save, and your GitHub events will now be sent to the webhook URL and saved on your account as Annotations. Use the following tags to query the annotations you want to display:


  1. Push Event Tags – ‘github’, ‘push’, <repo>, <branch>, <user>
  2. PR Event Tags – ‘github’, ‘pull-request’, <action>, <repo>, <user>
  3. Deploy Event Tags – ‘github’, ‘deployment’, <status>, <repo>, <user>, <environment>



 github-annotation-config



Visualize GitHub Metrics using the Telegraf Agent

Additionally, there is also a Telegraf Input plugin for GitHub. This plugin will send a variety of metrics to your Hosted Graphite account for increased visibility into your repositories. See our handy blog article with detailed configuration instructions HERE, and the official GH repository HERE.



github-example-dash

What is MetricFire?

MetricFire is a full-scale platform that provides infrastructure, system, and application monitoring using a suite of open-source tools. We will aggregate and store your data as time series metrics, which can be used to build custom dashboards and alerts. MetricFire takes away the burden of self-hosting your own monitoring solution, allowing you more time and freedom to work on your most important tasks.

 

     hg-main-page

         

 

MetricFire offers a complete ecosystem of end-to-end infrastructure monitoring, comprised of open-source Graphite and Grafana. MetricFire handles the aggregation, storage, and backups of your data, and offers alerting, team features, and API's for easy management of your monitoring environment. You can send server metrics using one of our agents, custom metrics from within your application code, and integration metrics from a variety of popular 3rd party services that we integrate with like Heroku, AWS, Azure, GCP, and many more!

         

Our Hosted Graphite product has improved upon standard Graphite to add data dimensionality, optimized storage, and offers additional tools and features that provide customers with a robust and well-rounded monitoring solution.

       

Benefits of Using MetricFire:

  • Simple, low-cost pricing
    A structured pricing model based on total unique time series metrics allows you to work within your budget. The predictability and transparent pricing allows you to keep your costs in check and plan for the future. 1 metric is 1 metric regardless of the source, or requests sent to and from the metric namespace.
  • Easy-to-use dashboards
    Our Hosted Dashboards provide endless options for customizing your visualizations, and allow you to share dashboards with clients.
  • Responsive alerting
    Receive alert notifications quickly through Email, PagerDuty, Slack, Microsoft Teams, OpsGenie, and custom webhooks.
  • Freedom of customization
    Send custom application metrics through your code. Our Language Guide can help you update your codebase to send event metrics via socket connections.
  • Fantastic customer support
    Fast and friendly support is provided by engineers, for engineers, to get you set up quickly. Start a conversation with us through the chat bubble below!
  • Enterprise-ready
    Dedicated clusters for users that need their own environment with custom parameters. Please reach out to us for more information.
      
The author for this testimonial, Jim Davies, Head of DevOps, MoneySuperMarket.com.
“As MetricFire scales effortlessly, we can push and store more metrics than we really need today but might need tomorrow. This increases our depth of understanding of the systems that we run and heads off any future problems.”
Jim Davies, Head of DevOps, MoneySuperMarket.com.

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Vendor lock-in's not our thing. We’re believers in you still owning your data, so you can request a full export at any time. That means you get all the benefits of an open-source tool, but with the security and stability of a SaaS tool.

“We now have over ten times the amount of metrics we started with, and on different accounts. One of the great things about MetricFire is that scaling to support this increase has been hassle-free, requiring no additional work on our side.”

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Save valuable engineering time and stick within your budget. We're known for our predictable and transparent pricing so it's easy to keeps costs under control.

“Building and managing an on-premise installation at this scale would require a lot of engineer time, especially in the first year...we use this engineering time to work on initiatives closer to our core business”

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Transparency is at the root of how we operate: from pricing to postmortems we're open about how we do things. We even publish our internal system metrics to our public status page.

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Questions?

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