cloudwatching

This is a reimplementation of the official cloudwatch-exporter. The main motivation is to use GetMetricData instead of GetMetricStatistics, which can lead to a reduction in AWS API calls by a factor of about 100.

Quickstart

go get -u github.com/ZipRecruiter/cloudwatching

Copy paste the following config to ~/mc.json:

{
  "exportconfigs": [
    {
      "dimensions": [
        "QueueName"
      ],
      "dimensionsMatch": {
        "QueueName": "(?i:prod)"
      },
      "dimensionsNoMatch": {
        "QueueName": "(?i:dev|staging)"
      },
      "name": "ApproximateAgeOfOldestMessage",
      "namespace": "AWS/SQS",
      "statistics": [
        "Maximum"
      ]
    },
    {
      "dimensions": [
        "QueueName"
      ],
      "dimensionsMatch": {
        "QueueName": "(?i:prod)"
      },
      "dimensionsNoMatch": {
        "QueueName": "(?i:dev|staging)"
      },
      "name": "NumberOfMessagesReceived",
      "namespace": "AWS/SQS",
      "statistics": [
        "Maximum"
      ]
    },
    {
      "dimensions": [
        "QueueName"
      ],
      "dimensionsMatch": {
        "QueueName": "(?i:prod)"
      },
      "dimensionsNoMatch": {
        "QueueName": "(?i:dev|staging)"
      },
      "name": "NumberOfMessagesDeleted",
      "namespace": "AWS/SQS",
      "statistics": [
        "Maximum"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "region": "us-east-1",
  "debug": false
}

And run:

MC_CONFIG=~/mc.json cloudwatching

You should be able to see the metrics at locahost:8080.

Description

This tool surfaces AWS CloudWatch metrics as prometheus metrics. It gets the metric data at scrape time, rather than pulling and caching periodically. Currently the naming of the metrics is not configurable, but that should be easy to fix if it would help anyone.

An important detail to be aware of is that CloudWatch metrics are generally unlike prometheus metrics (dimensions are less like labels and more like oddly named directories.) For the most part this is not a huge problem, though there are caveats:

• for DynamoDB Indexes, we have to append _index to the metric to prevent collisions if you are scraping table-level and index-level metrics;
• for RDS DB Clusters and DB Instances, we have to append _cluster and _instance respectively to prevent collisions when scraping cluster-level and instance-level metrics.

Advanced Customization

The majority of the code for cloudwatching is in a package so that less common requirements can be supported by a separate main package.

You should be able to trivially swap in other configuration styles (like YAML, if that's what you prefer,) have prometheus listen at a different location.

If you do create an alternate version please make sure that you are using go modules or some other pinning strategy. I have ideas to improve this package that will require breaking changes at some point; if you don't pin, you'll need to fix your code when that happens.

I suggest that you look over how we create the *cloudwatch.CloudWatch client and copy some of the patterns, since surfacing how the exporter is interacting with the AWS API can be tricky but is worth the effort.

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Hope this helps!

fREW Schmidt