Monitoring Amazon CloudWatch with webhooks

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

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.

 

 

 

  

If you have any questions about getting your AWS instances connected to Hosted Graphite, contact our team. We're happy to help you!

Webhooks are user-defined HTTP callbacks triggered by an event, such as pushing code to a repository or posting a comment to a blog. They allow you to send data from one application to another whenever a specific event occurs. When an event is triggered, the source site makes an HTTP request to the URL configured for the webhook. 

Webhooks are one of only a few methods available to allow web applications to exchange information with each other. At first, webhooks might seem like an API, but they are slightly different. Webhooks don't need to give a request to get a response, while APIs need to send a request to get a response. Webhooks let you receive, while APIs require you to retrieve. Think of it like API calls and polling need to knock on the door (requesting) to give that information to someone. Webhooks just simply throw that information at the door as there is no need to request permission.

There are many reasons to use webhooks. You could use a webhook to connect a payment gateway with your email marketing software to notify a customer by email if a payment bounces. You might use a webhook to send event data to external databases or data warehouses like Amazon's Redshift for further analysis. Or you could use webhooks to sync customer data between applications, such as when a user changes their email address. By using a webhook, you can ensure that the change is reflected in your CRM as well.

With MetricFire, you can use WebHooks in two different ways. First, they are useful for integrating metric data from various platforms and services, including CircleCi, Pingdom, Sentry, and more. Second, you can create WebHooks from within MetricFire to send notifications to applications and services that accept WebHooks.

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

MetricFire is a full-scale platform that provides infrastructure, system, and application monitoring using a suite of open-source monitoring tools. We enable you to use Hosted Graphite and aesthetic custom dashboards to visualize your metrics so you can understand what is happening.

MetricFire offers a complete ecosystem of end-to-end infrastructure monitoring, comprised of open-source Graphite and popular dashboards. Plugins for many other open-source projects are preconfigured, such as StatsD, collectd, and more. Not only does MetricFire fit well into many monitoring use cases, such as server monitoring, but we also offer application and cloud infrastructure monitoring.

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

• Cloud Monitoring
  
  
• Hosted Graphite
  
  
• Dashboards

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.

Benefits of Using MetricFire:

• Simple, low-cost pricing
  A structured pricing model based on unique time series metrics allows you to work within your budget. The predictability and transparent pricing allow you to keep your costs in check and plan for the future. 1 metric is 1 metric.
  
  
  
• Easy-to-use dashboards
  Easily share your dashboards with clients for free.
  
  
  
• Responsive alerting
  Alert notification integrations PagerDuty, Slack, email, and webhooks.
  
  
  
• Freedom of customization
  Custom metrics through your code.
  
  
  
• Fantastic customer support
  Highly available support is provided by engineers for engineers to get you set up quickly.
  
  
  
• Enterprise-ready
  Dedicated clusters for users that need their own environment.