Can you upload historical metrics to Cloudwatch? - amazon-web-services

We use AWS Cloudwatch Metrics and the associated dashboards a lot. Sometimes we want to add a new visualisation, but now we can only find the metric from our first PutMetricData onwards. We however often have the data retrospectively, just not uploaded at the time.
Can you retrospectively upload metrics to Cloudwatch?

Related

How to compress multiple metrics into a single cloud watch alarm using boto3 AWS

I'm trying to combine certain number of similar metrics into a single alarm in aws cloud watch. For example lets say for data quality monitoring in sagemaker, one among the metrics that are emitted from data quality monitoring job is feature baseline drift distance for each column so let say I've 600 columns so each column will have this metric. Is there a possible way to compress these metrics into a single cloud watch alarm ?
If not, Is there anyway to send the violation report as message via AWS SNS?
While I am not sure exactly on what out come you want when you refer to "compress the metrics into a single alarm." You can look at using metric math

how to check number of times a dynamoDB table has been accessed

I have a dynamoDB table lets say sampleTable. I want to find out how many times this table has been accessed from cli. How do i check this?
PS. I have checked the metrics but couldnt find any particular metric which gives this information.
There is no CloudWatch metric to monitor API calls to DynamoDB.
However, there is CloudTrail (CT). Thus you can to go CT's event history and look for API calls to DynamoDB from the last 90 days. You can export the history to a CSV file, and investigate off line as well.
For ongoing monitoring of the API calls you can enable CT trail which will store event log details in S3 for as long as you require:
Logging DynamoDB Operations by Using AWS CloudTrail
If you have the trial created, you can use Amazon Athena to query the log data for the statistics of interests, such as number of specific API calls to DynamoDb:
Querying AWS CloudTrail Logs
Also, you could create custom metric based on the trial's log data (once you configure CloudWatch logs for the trial):
Analyzing AWS CloudTrail in Amazon CloudWatch
However, I don't think you can differentiate between API calls done using CLI, or SDK or by other means.

Cloudwatch - Metrics are expiring

I currently have a bunch of custom metric's based in multiple regions across our AWS account.
I thought I was going crazy but have now confirmed that the metric I created a while ago is expiring when not used for a certain time period (could be 2 weeks).
Here's my setup.
I create a new metric on my log entry - which has no expiry date;
I then go to the main page on CloudWatch --> then to Metrics to view any metrics (I understand this will only display new metric hits when there are hits that match the metric rule).
About 2 weeks ago, I had 9 Metrics logged under my "Custom Namespaces", and I now have 8 - as if it does not keep all the data:
As far as i'm aware, all my metrics should stay in place (unless I remove them), however, it seems as though if these are not hit consistently, the data "expires", is that correct? If so, how are you meant to track historical data?
Thanks
CloudWatch will remove metrics from search if there was no new data published for that metric in the last 2 weeks.
This is mentioned in passing in the FAQ for EC2 metrics, but I think it applies to all metrics.
From 'will I lose the metrics data if I disable monitoring for an Amazon EC2 instance question' in the FAQ:
CloudWatch console limits the search of metrics to 2 weeks after a
metric is last ingested to ensure that the most up to date instances
are shown in your namespace.
Your data is still there however. Data adheres to a different retention policy.
You can still get your data if you know what the metric name is. If you added your metric to a dashboard, it will still be visible there. You can use CloudWatch PutDashboards API to add the metric to a dashboard or use CloudWatch GetMetricStatistics API to get the raw data.

Monitoring AWS Data Pipeline

In our infrastructure we have a bunch of pipelines for ETL data before pushing them into Redshift. We use s3 bucket for logs and SNS alerting for activities. Most of that activities are standard CopyActivity, RedshiftCopyActivity and SqlActivity.
We want to get all available metrics for this activities to dashboard them (E.g.: Cloudwatch) so we know what's going on that side in one single place. Unfortunately I didn't find much information on AWS documentation for that and have to do all that manually in code.
What is the most common way for monitoring AWS Data Pipeline?

AWS Cloudwatch monitoring for S3

Amazon Cloudwatch provides some very useful metrics for monitoring my EC2s, load balancers, elasticache and RDS databases, etc and allows me to set alarms for a whole range of criteria; but is there any way to configure it to monitor my S3s as well? Or are there any other monitoring tools (besides simply enabling logging) that will help me monitor the numbers of POST/GET requests and data volumes for my S3 resources? And to provide alarms for thresholds of activity or increased datastorage?
AWS S3 is a managed storage service. The only metrics available in AWS CloudWatch for S3 are NumberOfObjects and BucketSizeBytes. In order to understand your S3 usage better you need to do some extra work.
I have recently written an AWS Lambda function to do exactly what you ask for and it's available here:
https://github.com/maginetv/s3logs-cloudwatch
It works by parsing S3 Server side log files and aggregates/exports metrics to AWS Cloudwatch (CloudWatch allows you to publish custom metrics).
Example graphs that you will get in AWS CloudWatch after deploying this function on your AWS account are:
RestGetObject_RequestCount
RestPutObject_RequestCount
RestHeadObject_RequestCount
BatchDeleteObject_RequestCount
RestPostMultiObjectDelete_RequestCount
RestGetObject_HTTP_2XX_RequestCount
RestGetObject_HTTP_4XX_RequestCount
RestGetObject_HTTP_5XX_RequestCount
+ many others
Since metrics are exported to CloudWatch, you can easily set up alarms for them as well.
CloudFormation template is included in GitHub repo and you can deploy this function very quickly to gain visibility into your S3 bucket usage.
EDIT 2016-12-10:
In November 2016 AWS has added extra S3 request metrics in CloudWatch that can be enabled when needed. This includes metrics like AllRequests, GetRequests, PutRequests, DeleteRequests, HeadRequests etc. See Monitoring Metrics with Amazon CloudWatch documentation for more details about this feature.
I was also unable to find any way to do this with CloudWatch. This question from April 2012 was answered by Derek#AWS as not having S3 support in CloudWatch. https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=338089
The only thing I could think of would be to import the S3 access logs to a log service (like Splunk). Then create a custom cloud watch metric where you post the data that you parse from the logs. But then you have to filter out the polling of the access logs and…
And while you were at it, you could just create the alarms in Splunk instead of in S3.
If your use case is to simply alert when you are using it too much, you could set up an account billing alert for your S3 usage.
I think this might depend on where you are looking to track the access from. I.e. if you are trying to measure/watch usage of S3 objects from outside http/https requests then Anthony's suggestion if enabling S3 logging and then importing into splunk (or redshift) for analysis might work. You can also watch billing status on requests every day.
If trying to guage usage from within your own applications, there are some AWS SDK cloudwatch metrics:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSJavaSDK/latest/javadoc/com/amazonaws/metrics/package-summary.html
and
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSJavaSDK/latest/javadoc/com/amazonaws/services/s3/metrics/S3ServiceMetric.html
S3 is a managed service, meaning that you don't need to take action based on system events in order to keep it up and running (as long as you can afford to pay for the service's usage). The spirit of CloudWatch is to help with monitoring services that require you to take action in order to keep them running.
For example, EC2 instances (which you manage yourself) typically need monitoring to alert when they're overloaded or when they're underused or else when they crash; at some point action needs to be taken in order to spin up new instances to scale out, spin down unused instances to scale back in, or reboot instances that have crashed. CloudWatch is meant to help you do the job of managing these resources more effectively.
To enable Request and Data transfer metrics in your bucket you can run the below command. Be aware that these are paid metrics.
aws s3api put-bucket-metrics-configuration \
--bucket YOUR-BUCKET-NAME \
--metrics-configuration Id=EntireBucket
--id EntireBucket
This tutorial describes how to do it in AWS Console with point and click interface.