Posted On: Oct 6, 2016
Amazon CloudWatch announces the availability of an open source collectd output plugin to simplify sending custom metrics to CloudWatch. collectd is a popular, open-source daemon that gathers system statistics for a wide variety of applications. The CloudWatch collectd plugin can be used on both AWS and non-AWS environments to gather host and application metrics such as memory and disk usage for a variety of applications such as Apache, NXGINX, MySQL, etc. The metrics gathered by collectd will be published as custom metrics to CloudWatch. These collectd metrics can then be used to set up alarms for triggering notification and auto-scaling actions or saved to dashboards for quick viewing in CloudWatch.
The CloudWatch collectd plugin simplifies the metric publishing process with an automated installation script. It follows best practices such as metric aggregation and batching to reduce API usage, and enforces metric whitelisting for controlled publishing to CloudWatch with predictable costs. When used in AWS environments, the plugin will auto add the instance ID as a metric dimension, auto detect instance region for publishing metrics accordingly, and allow role-based access. The plugin supports installation on Amazon Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, and CentOS.
You can use the plugin for free and custom metrics published to CloudWatch will follow the current pricing plan. To get started, visit the Github AWSLabs repository.