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Monitoring AWS with collectd

Integrating AWS and collectd with your monitoring system

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

What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a platform that provides a multitude of services. In fact, AWS provides more than 175 different services such as computing, storage, networking, database, analytics, application services, deployment, management, mobile, developer tools, and tools for the Internet of Things. 

You can build, host, run, and monitor your software entirely within AWS. AWS eliminates the need for developers and businesses to have their own servers, databases, or networks. 

AWS is the world’s biggest and most widely adopted cloud platform. It has completely changed how web applications are built, and the nature of DevOps and SRE work.

There are many options for doing performance monitoring for applications built in AWS. AWS provides a monitoring tool called CloudWatch that automatically pulls in metrics from all areas of your application. However, using CloudWatch for everything can become very expensive.

If you’re monitoring a small application, CloudWatch will be suitable for your monitoring needs. However, if you’re monitoring a massive application with lots of custom metrics, the cost of monitoring with CloudWatch quickly escalates to beyond reasonable.

Monitoring your AWS with MetricFire is a great option for reducing the cost of your monitoring and for getting better functionality. MetricFire can pull your metrics directly from AWS and put them into a custom AWS monitoring dashboard. MetricFire can alert on these metrics, and can send notifications directly to your phone, email, or slack. 

What is collectd?

Collectd is system statistics collection daemon that periodically retrieves system and application performance metrics and then stores them using various storage solutions such as RRD files. Collectd is a free open-source project. It can gather metrics from multiple sources, including operating systems, applications, log files, and external devices. You can use the statistics compiled by collectd to monitor systems, detect performance bottlenecks, and predict future system loads.

Because it's written in C, collectd is built for performance and portability, allowing you to run it on systems with no scripting language or an embedded system. It comes with optimizations and features to handle hundreds of thousands of metrics. Collectd also lets you configure what metrics you want to capture and what frequency you want to capture them, allowing you to scale back your metrics collection collect only the metrics that make sense for your business needs. Its modular architecture allows the daemon to use only the resources required to do the job.

 

Collectd only performs the collection and transmission of the metrics. It does not analyze or present the metrics on its own. But by integrating collectd with the Metricfire platform, you can enjoy metrics displayed on aesthetically pleasing dashboards. Our integration lets you view metrics on essential systems and application log messages on your Hosted Graphite graphs and dashboards. 

You can download a collectd configuration file pre-filled with your Hosted Graphite account details on our add-ons page. This configuration comes with several collectd plugins enabled, including CPU, DF (file system usage), disk, entropy, interface, load, memory, processes, rrdtool, swap, users and write_graphite.

How to integrate AWS and collectd with your monitoring system

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

Don't just take our word for it

Why thousands of engineers choose us:

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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.”

Maxime Audet, Cloud-Ops Team Lead, Coveo

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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.”

Itai Yaffe, Big Data Developer, Nielsen

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Our first line, technical support comes from engineers, for engineers. So you get highly detailed, expert support when you need it.

"Every time I have a question, I get an answer from support after just a couple of hours. Their technical knowledge is excellent.”

Shahar Kobrinsky, VP of Architecture and Scale, Eyeview

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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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