I am trying to send custom metric data of my application to CloudWatch using Cloudwatch Agent.
I am able to successfully send the data to CloudWatch using aws cloudwatch put-metric-data command with AWS CLI, but instead i would like to use the cloudwatch agent to receive my application metrics (connection count , queue count etc) and send that data to cloudwatch via Cloudwatch agent. Please help.
At first, you need to check what metrics CWAgent supports and collects.
Reference: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/metrics-collected-by-CloudWatch-agent.html
From my point of view, CWAgent mostly collects OS metrics that it can read directly from your machine instead of metrics such as connection-count from your application.
The way you did using the put-metric-data is a good direction, you can customize it with your own code.
But recently, AWS did mention about OpenTelemetry which supports application metrics and integrates with CloudWatch Agent. I believe this way is the one you are looking for.
Reference:
https://aws-otel.github.io/docs/introduction
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/CloudWatch-Agent-open-telemetry.html
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I have an on-premise app deployed in an Application Server (e.g. Tomcat) and it generates its own log file. If I decide to migrate this to an AWS EC2, including the Application Server, is it possible to port my application logs in Cloudwatch instead? or is Cloudwatch only capable of logging the runtime logs in my application server? is it a lot of work to do this or is this even possible?
Kind of confuse on Cloudwatch. Seems it can do multiple things but is it really right to make it do that? Its only supposed to log metrics right, so it can alert whatever or whoever needs to be alerted.
If you have already developed application that produces its own log files, you can use CloudWatch Logs Agent to ingest the logs into CloudWatch Logs:
After installation is complete, logs automatically flow from the instance to the log stream you create while installing the agent. The agent confirms that it has started and it stays running until you disable it.
The metrics, such as RAM usage, disk space, can also be monitored and pushed to CloudWatch through the agent.
In both cases, logs and metrics, you can setup CloudWatch Alarms to automatically detect anomalies and notify you, or perform other actions, when they are detected. For logs, this is done through metric filters:
You can search and filter the log data coming into CloudWatch Logs by creating one or more metric filters. Metric filters define the terms and patterns to look for in log data as it is sent to CloudWatch Logs. CloudWatch Logs uses these metric filters to turn log data into numerical CloudWatch metrics that you can graph or set an alarm on.
update
You can also have your application to inject logs directly to CloudWatch logs using AWS SDK. For example, in python, you can use put_log_events.
I am using Elasitsearch to get logs from cloudwatch log group by subscribing a lambda to the log group. So whenever there is a log event pushed to the log group, my lambda will be triggered and it will save the log to Elasticsearch. Then I can search the log via Kibana dashboard.
I'd like to put the metrics data to Elasticsearch as well but I couldn't find a way to subscribe to metrics data.
You can use AWS Module in MetricBeat from the Elastic Beat's family. Note that pulling metrics from cloudwatch will result in chargeable API calls. So you should carefully consider the scraping frequency.
Thanks
I have a view on a PostgreSQL RDS instance that lists any ongoing deadlocks. Ideally, there are no deadlocks in the database, causing the view to show nothing, but on rare occasions, there are.
How would I setup an alarm in Cloudwatch to query this view and raise an alarm if any records return?
I found the cool script on Github specifically for this:
A Serverless MySQL RDS Data Collection script to push Custom Metrics to CloudWatch on AWS
Basically, there are 2 main possibilities to publish any custom metrics on CloudWatch:
Via API
You can run it on a schedule on EC2 instance (AWS example) or as a lambda function (great manual with code examples)
With CloudWatch agent
Here is the pretty example for Monitor your Microsoft SQL Server using custom metrics with Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Systems Manager.
After all, you should set up CloudWatch alarms with Metric Math and relevant thresholds.
It is not possible to configure Amazon CloudWatch to look inside an Amazon RDS database.
You will need some code running somewhere that regularly runs a query on the database and sends a custom metric to Amazon CloudWatch.
For example, you could trigger an AWS Lambda function, or use cron on an Amazon EC2 instance to trigger a script.
With CloudWatch you can monitor applications running on AWS. Is it also possible to monitor an external service?
For example, I have a REST API and I want to get notified once that API is not accessible anymore. Does AWS offer you a monitoring tool for that purpose?
Not Cloudwatch just by itself, but you can use a combination of Cloudwatch and Lambdas to do what you're asking. You can use cloudwatch events to run lambdas on a schedule, something like once every 5 mins.
CloudwatchEvents -> HealthCheck Lambda -> Cloudwatch Custom Metrics
Your lambda can then ping the API you're monitoring the health of, and either send its status to cloudwatch as a custom metric; or potentially if your lambda throws an error when the API fails, the lambda error metric which is already in cloudwatch becomes your API failure metric
Once the metric exists in cloudwatch, either as a custom metric or the lambda metric by proxy, you're able to do usual cloudwatch things like alarms and notifications.
Now there is a simple way to monitor external resources - CloudWatch Synthetics. Just create a canary to regularly monitor a website, API or even validate a multi-step UI flow.
Read more in the docs: CloudWatch > Using Synthetic Monitoring
Amazon CloudWatch supports custom metrics generated by your applications and services that you do not run on AWS. In this way, CloudWatch can be an integrated storage and aggregation point, allowing you to monitor all of the metrics that you collect, and track on a single platform.
There might be more than one way to reach your goal by using the AWS CLI, an API/SDK, or the CloudWatch collectd plugin etc. I'd recommend you take a look at these links for more details: link-1, link-2, link-3, link-4
I had already created 7 other metrics based on some log files I send to CloudWatch with no problems.
Some time ago we had a problem with MongoDB connection, and I identified that through logs, so I'd like to create a Metric, so that I can create an Alarm based on it. I did create the Metric, but (of course) there are no data being fed into that Metic, because no more "MongoError" messages exists.
But does that also mean that I can't even access the Metric to create the Alarm? Because this is what is happening right now. The Metric cannot be seen anywhere, only in the "Filters" section of the Logs, which won't allow me to create Alarms or create graphics or anything.
I have already posted this on AWS forums but that usually doesn't help.
An Amazon CloudWatch custom metric is only created when data is stored against the custom metric. Therefore, you'll need to push a data value to make appear and then you will be able to create an alarm.
You can push some data to CloudWatch with the AWS Command-Line Interface (CLI), eg:
aws cloudwatch put-metric-data --namespace MongoDB --metric-name errors --value 0