Monitoring Amazon ELB with MetricFire

To integrate Amazon ELB and MetricFire, please reach out to MetricFire. Book a demo with the MetricFire team to discuss integrating Amazon ELB 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 Load Balancing is a tool that automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, including Amazon EC2 instances, containers, virtual appliances, Lambda functions, and IP addresses. Your application traffic can be handled by a single availability zone or across multiple zones. 

There are four types of load balancers available with Amazon Elastic Load Balancing:

• The Application Load Balancer is best suited for load balancing HTTP and HTTPS traffic with advanced request routing targeted at modern application architectures, including microservices and containers.
• The Network Load Balancer is best suited for load-balancing Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), Transport Layer Security (TLS), and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) traffic where extreme performance is required. 
• The Gateway Load Balancer is used to deploy and run third-party virtual networking appliances. It provides load balancing and auto-scaling for collections of third-party apps.
• The Classic Load Balancer gives you basic load balancing across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. It operates at both the connection and request levels.

Amazon Elastic Load Balancing monitors your applications' health and performance in real time with Amazon CloudWatch metrics, logging, and request tracing. These monitoring tools help you analyze your applications' behavior, uncover issues, and identify performance bottlenecks in your application stack. By using Elastic Load Balancing, you can also ensure compliance with application Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

With Metricfire, you can turbocharge your Amazon Elastic Load Balancing 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 load balancing 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 integrate Amazon ELB and MetricFire with your monitoring system, sign up for a free trial with MetricFire. Talk with the MetricFire team about how to integrate Amazon ELB and MetricFire, and get Amazon ELB interacting with your MetricFire dashboards in minutes.