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Monitoring Amazon EFS with Pingdom

Integrating Amazon EFS and Pingdom with your monitoring system

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

What is Amazon EFS?

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) provides a scalable but easy-to-use elastic NFS (network file system) for AWS Cloud services and on-premises resources. It supports on-demand requirements to the petabyte scale. It is fully managed and can shrink or expand as you add and remove files. This high level of change removes the need to manage capacity to accommodate growth.

 

Amazon EFS provides parallel shared access to thousands of Amazon EC2 instances, allowing your applications to achieve high aggregate throughput levels and IOPS (Input/output operations per second) with consistently low latencies.

 

You can use Amazon EFS for almost any purpose, from small home storage to business-critical applications, including big data analytics, database backups, application development, testing, web serving, content management, media and entertainment workflows, and container storage.

  

You can monitor your Amazon EFS file systems using Amazon CloudWatch. Metrics include the number of client connections, the amount of data read or written, file system storage, and more. You can use your Amazon EFS console to display a series of graphs based on the raw data from Amazon CloudWatch. For more extensive monitoring, you would find MetricFire an excellent companion thanks to its more advanced features.

 

With Metricfire, you can turbocharge your Amazon Elastic File System 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, scraping the unwanted data. You can also establish clear rules to toss out data you no longer have, plus get custom alerts via email or Slack when your EFS files system falls out of alignment.

  

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 Pingdom?

Pingdom is a monitoring system that uses both synthetic and real user monitoring to deliver enhanced app and website troubleshooting.

Pingdom's synthetic monitoring allows you to simulate visitor interaction with your website or app to spot app errors or website failures before your users do. You can monitor site uptime from over a hundred locations worldwide or troubleshoot your website speed and identify webpage issues. You can also test user transactions such as shopping carts, logins, registrations, and even URL hijacking.

Pingdom's real-time user monitoring allows you to monitor how your users interact with your website or app. Pingdom's real user monitoring (RUM) is fully scalable and intuitive. Learn how your users experience your site based on device, location, and browser. Ensure you meet your SLAs or KPIs by setting your own goals and monitoring your performance. Record and compare user metrics over time to see how your website performs over weeks, months, or years. 

 

Digital marketers can use Pingdom's synthetic monitoring to test new campaigns and ensure their users have the best experience. They can use Pingdom's real-time user monitoring to review how different user experience aspects, such as browser type or device, affect sales.

Web developers can test for website or app performance and spot defects while updates are in development. Web host providers can monitor performance in real-time to ensure client uptime. IT/Web Ops can use synthetic monitoring to quickly identify bottlenecks and spot backend issues with Pingdom's real-time user monitoring.

With MetricFire, you can amplify Pingdom's synthetic and real-time user monitoring. By integrating Pingdom with the MetricFire platform, you can display your metrics on aesthetically pleasing dashboards. With MetricFire, you can quickly understand complex websites at a glance or compare your Pingdom data with other monitoring systems.

 

How to set up a Pingdom webhook

The webhook provided by Hosted Graphite can be used in Pingdom both as an alerting endpoint and with integrations. To get Pingdom alert information added to Hosted Graphite as annotations, follow these instructions:

1. Copy your Pingdom webhook location by clicking the ‘Copy Webhook Location’ button
2. Adding an Alerting Endpoint
3. Browse to your Pingdom account, visit the ‘alerting’ section, and click ‘Alerting Endpoints’
4. On the top right-hand side, click “Add Alerting Endpoint”
5. Click ‘Add Contact Method’, select ‘URL / Webhook’, and paste your Hosted Graphite Pingdom webhook location, click ‘Add’
6. Save the endpoint

 

You’ve now saved a Hosted Graphite webhook for your alerting endpoint. Assign this alerting endpoint as one of your contact methods for an outage, and then add the Pingdom annotations to your alerts.
 

Adding an Integration

1. Browse your Pingdom account, visit the ‘Integrations’ section, and click ‘Integrations’
2. On the top right-hand side, click “Add integration”
3. Select Type: ‘URL / Webhook’, give your integration a name (e.g. ‘Hosted Graphite’), and paste your Hosted Graphite Pingdom webhook location. Make sure the Active box is ticked, and click ‘Save integration’
4. Select one of your checks or create a new one, and scroll to the bottom of the Edit window. Your new integration should appear in the ‘Connect integrations’ list. Select the integration, and click ‘Create Check’/’Modify Check’
 

Your PIngdom check will now send detailed event information to Hosted Graphite, including all your specified check tags and the following check-type specific information, as searchable annotation tags:

HTTP: full URL (including HTTP(s) prefix)
DNS: expected IP, name server
UDP: sent string, expect response

To Enable Pingdom Annotations in Your Dashboards

Browse to your Hosted Graphite graph, and enable Annotations.

Enable Pingdom Annotations

Use the tag “Pingdom” to see all Pingdom alerts or the hostname of the Pingdom check to see tagged annotations for that host. If you are using Pingdom Integrations, you can also search by your check tags or any of the specific fields listed above.

Finally, you will see site outages on your graphs

More information on annotations can be found by following our annotations documentation.

How to integrate Amazon EFS and Pingdom with your monitoring system

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

What is MetricFire?

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.

 

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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. 
      
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”

Jim Davies, Head of DevOps, MoneySuperMarket.com

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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.

“There’s complete transparency with everything MetricFire do which means we can accurately predict what we’ll be spending and comfortably keep within our budget.”

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Questions?

Don’t see the integration you’re looking for? Need help setting up your monitoring? Get in touch and one of our engineers will help you out.

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