Monitoring Amazon Streams with Slack

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

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams (KDS) is a data streaming service that is both scalable and durable and operates in real time. It can capture gigabytes of data per second from hundreds of thousands of sources, including websites, databases, social media feeds, IT logs, financial transactions, and location-tracking events. Real-time analytics tools such as dashboards, anomaly detection, and dynamic pricing are updated in milliseconds.

KDS is based on a producer/consumer model. A producer loads data records into Amazon KDS. A consumer then processes the data records from the stream. For example, a producer could load web server log data to a Kinesis data stream, where a consumer can process and analyze the log data.

You can use Kinesis Data Streams to collect log and event data from servers, desktops, and mobile devices. You can then build Kinesis Applications to process your data continuously, generate metrics, populate dashboards, and aggregate data into stores such as Amazon S3.

You can create Kinesis Applications that run real-time analytics on high-frequency event data events. For example, you could write an application to analyze sensor data collected by Kinesis Data Streams to gain insights into your sensor data.

If you collect gaming data, Kinesis Data Streams can collect data about player-game interactions and feed the data back into your gaming platform. This strategy can help you design a game that provides engaging and dynamic experiences based on players' past actions and behaviors.

With Metricfire, you can turbocharge your data stream monitoring services. By integrating Amazon CloudWatch with the Metricfire platform, you can display your KDS 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 streams are doing something they 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.

Slack is a popular channel-based messaging platform that improves business communication and collaboration. This cloud-based solution offers enterprise-grade security and scalability, along with many innovative features that make it easier to have quality work conversations.

The core functionality of Slack revolves around chat rooms where users send messages and files. You can organize these rooms by topics, teams, projects, office locations, and other categories to keep the discussions highly relevant to that work. Users can also directly message each other. In addition to text messages, voice, screen sharing, and video chats are also supported.

You have a lot of flexibility in working with Slack. Your channels can be open to everyone in the organization, available for users outside of your organization, or made private for a subset of employees. A robust search function simplifies the process of looking up information, so it’s readily available. There is also an option of free-to-use and paid plans.

Slack workspaces create a central repository for work-related information, whether that’s being shared in messages, file attachments, links, or other formats. Slack performance monitoring allows you to see how your organization is utilizing this platform, whether it’s having issues, and ways to optimize it for your specific use cases.

One of Slack’s strengths is its integration support with many software types, allowing you to perform your work without leaving the workspace. For example, when you connect MetricFire and Slack, you can send immediate notifications to a specific channel so the right staff members see it. Since the alerts show up in a centralized communications tool being used for other daily work activities, they get noticed and acted on faster.

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