Monitoring Amazon SQS with Graphite APIs

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

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a message queuing service that you use to decouple and scale microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. Amazon SQS supports programmatic sending of messages via web service applications as a way to communicate over the Internet. It is fully managed and eliminates the complexity and overhead associated with operating message-oriented middleware. Amazon SQS is used by companies such as Netflix, Dropbox, NASA, and more.

With SQS, you can send, store, and receive messages between software components with the need for another service. You can get started with SQS in minutes using the AWS console, Command-Line Interface, or SDK of your choice.

SQS offers two types of message queues:

• Standard queues provide maximum throughput, best-effort ordering, and at-least-once delivery. 
• SQS FIFO queues ensure messages are processed exactly once, in the exact order you send them.

You can use Amazon SQS to add an extra layer of security to your messaging services. You can exchange sensitive data between applications using server-side encryption (SSE) to encrypt each message. Plus, because Amazon SQS scales elastically with your applications, it is a highly cost-effective messaging solution.

Amazon SQS is fully integrated with Amazon CloudWatch, allowing you to view and analyze your Amazon SQS queues metrics, which is where MetricFire comes into play.

With Metricfire, you can turbocharge your Amazon SQS 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 message queues are doing something they shouldn't.

Graphite-API is a tool designed to fetch metrics from time series databases such as Whisper or Cyanite. Once it has gathered the metrics, it then renders graphs or JSON data out of each of these time series. Graphite-API is an API-based alternative to Graphite-web, so it does not have any built-in dashboard. Instead, this AP server tool replicates Graphite-web behavior, and works with the abundant Graphite dashboard applications available on the market such as Grafana.

The Graphite-API application comes with several improvements over Graphite-web:

• The Graphite-API application is entirely stateless and doesn't require a SQL database to function.
• It supports both Python 2 and 3.
• The HTTP API accepts JSON data and allows the formation of data and query string parameters.
• The application is straightforward for the user to install and configure.
• Graphite-API architecture is simpler, almost minimalistic, and it has fewer moving parts than Graphite-web.
• It comes with a plugin architecture for integrating with time series databases or for adding more analysis functions.
• The API codebase has a stronger focus on test coverage and code quality.

Graphite API does not come with any web or graphical interfaces. This feature gap is where MetricFire comes into its own.

With our Hosted Graphite solution, we've taken the best parts of open-source Graphite and supercharged them. We also added everything missing in Graphite: a built-in agent, team accounts, granular dashboard permissions, and integrations with other technologies and services like AWS, Heroku, logging tools, and more. Hosted Graphite's advanced filtering lets you choose only the data views you want to see, so you can discard the rest. You can also set up simple rules to discard data you no longer keep, plus receive alerts via email or the Slack messaging platform.

To integrate Amazon SQS and Graphite APIs with your monitoring system, sign up for a free trial with MetricFire. Talk with the MetricFire team about how to integrate Amazon SQS and Graphite APIs and get Amazon SQS and Graphite APIs 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.