Monitoring Amazon EBS with MetricFire

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

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. 
    

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is a block-storage service designed for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It is designed to scale for and support both throughput and transaction-intensive workloads. Amazon EBS is used to deploy a wide range of workloads, including relational and non-relational databases, enterprise applications, big data analytics engines, file systems, containerized applications, and media workflows.

Amazon EBS the perfect block-storage service for mission-critical systems and can easily scale to petabytes of data. 

EBS volumes behave like raw, unformatted block devices that you can mount as devices. You can install a file system on top of your EBS volumes or use them in any way you would use any other block device. You can use EBS volumes as the primary storage for file systems, databases, or any applications requiring access to raw, unformatted, block-level storage. It's also useful for database-style applications that rely on random reads and writes.

Amazon EBS is a great tool for testing, allowing you to duplicate and test your development or production environments. Plus, you can copy Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) or EBS Snapshots to run applications in different AWS regions, allowing you to backup data across geographies help you reduce data loss, and increase data recovery times.

Amazon Elastic Block Store sends data points to Amazon CloudWatch, including volume metrics and fast snapshot restore metrics, which is where a MetricFire integration comes to the fore.

With Metricfire, you can turbocharge your Amazon Elastic Block Store monitoring services. By integrating Amazon CloudWatch with the Metricfire platform, you can display your metrics on aesthetically pleasing dashboards. 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 keep, plus receive alerts via email or Slack when your block store is doing something it shouldn't.

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.

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