Monitoring AWS with Graphite APIs

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

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a platform that provides a multitude of services. 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 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 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. 

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.

Graphite-API is designed to fetch metrics from time series databases such as Whisper. Once it has gathered the metrics, the Graphite Render API can then be used to render 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 dashboards. Instead, this AP server tool replicates Graphite-web behavior, and works with the abundant Graphite dashboard applications available on the market such as Grafana.

Graphite API does not come with any web or graphical interfaces on its own. This feature gap is where MetricFire comes into play, by providing a Hosted Dashboarding environment for visualizations, and MetricFire's own API's that can be used to programmatically manage your Hosted Graphite account.

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: built-in aggregation, storage, backups, alerting, team accounts, granular dashboard permissions, and integrations with other technologies and services like AWS, Azure, GCP, Heroku, 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, PagerDuty, and Slack among others.

MetricFire is a full-scale platform that provides infrastructure, system, and application monitoring using a suite of open-source tools. We will aggregate and store your data as time series metrics, which can be used to build custom dashboards and alerts. MetricFire takes away the burden of self-hosting your own monitoring solution, allowing you more time and freedom to work on your most important tasks.

MetricFire offers a complete ecosystem of end-to-end infrastructure monitoring, comprised of open-source Graphite and Grafana. MetricFire handles the aggregation, storage, and backups of your data, and offers alerting, team features, and API's for easy management of your monitoring environment. You can send server metrics using one of our agents, custom metrics from within your application code, and integration metrics from a variety of popular 3rd party services that we integrate with like Heroku, AWS, Azure, GCP, and many more!

Our Hosted Graphite product has improved upon standard Graphite to add data dimensionality, optimized storage, and offers additional tools and features that provide customers with a robust and well-rounded monitoring solution.

Benefits of Using MetricFire:

• Simple, low-cost pricing
  A structured pricing model based on total unique time series metrics allows you to work within your budget. The predictability and transparent pricing allows you to keep your costs in check and plan for the future. 1 metric is 1 metric regardless of the source, or requests sent to and from the metric namespace.
  
• Easy-to-use dashboards
  Our Hosted Dashboards provide endless options for customizing your visualizations, and allow you to share dashboards with clients.
  
• Responsive alerting
  Receive alert notifications quickly through Email, PagerDuty, Slack, Microsoft Teams, OpsGenie, and custom webhooks.
  
• Freedom of customization
  Send custom application metrics through your code. Our Language Guide can help you update your codebase to send event metrics via socket connections.
  
• Fantastic customer support
  Fast and friendly support is provided by engineers, for engineers, to get you set up quickly. Start a conversation with us through the chat bubble below!
  
• Enterprise-ready
  Dedicated clusters for users that need their own environment with custom parameters. Please reach out to us for more information.