Monitoring Amazon RDS with Amazon ElastiCache

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

The Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service you can use to set up and manage relational databases in the AWS Cloud. It provides a cost-efficient way to leverage fully managed and scalable industry-standard relational databases without the need to look after everyday database administration tasks.

When you subscribe to Amazon RDS, you get your cloud-based server, CPU, memory, storage, and IOPS, all bundled together. You can set up, manage, and scale each of these services independently. If you need more CPU or more storage, you can quickly allocate them. Amazon RDS manages your backups, and software patching, plus it includes automatic failure detection and recovery. You can use different database flavors, including MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server.

You can configure Amazon RDS for high availability and failover by setting up a primary instance and a synchronous secondary instance. Plus, you can control who can access your RDS databases by using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) services to assign users permissions.

Amazon RDS is fully integrated with Amazon CloudWatch, allowing you to monitor your database's health and performance. By subscribing to Amazon RDS events, you can be notified about changes to a DB instance, DB parameter group, DB security group, or DB snapshot.

More importantly, with Metricfire, you can turbocharge your Amazon RDS 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 a database issue is detected.

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.

Amazon ElastiCache is an in-memory data store and cache that supports resource-heavy applications that require sub-millisecond response times. It delivers secure and fast performance by utilizing an end-to-end optimized stack that runs on customer-dedicated nodes. Plus, Amazon ElastiCache is fully managed, including tasks such as setup, configuration, hardware provisioning, software patching, failure recovery, and backups. ElastiCache supports two open-source in-memory caching engines which are named Memcached and Redis.

With Amazon ElastiCache, you can quickly set up and run many popular open-source compatible in-memory data stores in the cloud. Its fully scalable architecture lets you boost your existing databases' performance or build data-intensive apps by retrieving data from low latency and high throughput in-memory data stores. For this reason, Amazon ElastiCache is often used to improve the performance of session stores, gaming apps, geospatial services, caching, queuing, and Real-Time Analytics.

One of the key features of Amazon ElastiCache is its scalability, allowing you to scale up, scale in, and scale out to meet your application demands. It supports both write and memory scaling with sharding. 

ElastiCache continuously monitors your data storage to keep your workloads up and running, which is where MetricFire comes to the fore.

With Metricfire, you can turbocharge your Amazon ElastiCache 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 data storage cache 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 RDS and Amazon ElastiCache with your monitoring system, sign up for a free trial with MetricFire. Talk with the MetricFire team about how to integrate Amazon RDS and Amazon ElastiCache and get Amazon RDS and Amazon ElastiCache 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 users a complete ecosystem of end-to-end infrastructure monitoring, comprised of popular open-source monitoring software services: Graphite and popular dashboards. Plugins for many other open-source projects are preconfigured, such as StatsD, collectd, and Kubernetes. You get all these within a hosted environment as a single product. Not only does MetricFire fit well into the infrastructure monitoring use-case, such as network monitoring and server monitoring, but we also do application monitoring and business intelligence.

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.

The benefits of MetricFire are:

• 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.