Amazon ECS and New Relic Integration

Input and output integration overview

The Amazon ECS Input Plugin enables Telegraf to gather metrics from AWS ECS containers, providing detailed insights into container performance and resource usage.

This plugin allows the sending of metrics to New Relic Insights using the Metrics API, enabling effective monitoring and analysis of application performance.

Integration details

Amazon ECS

The Amazon ECS plugin for Telegraf is designed to collect metrics from ECS (Elastic Container Service) tasks running on AWS Fargate or EC2 instances. By utilizing the ECS metadata and stats API endpoints (v2 and v3), it fetches real-time information about container performance and health within a task. This plugin operates within the same task as the inspected workload, ensuring seamless access to metadata and statistics. Notably, it incorporates ECS-specific features that distinguish it from the Docker input plugin, such as handling unique ECS metadata formats and statistics. Users can include or exclude specific containers and adjust which container states to monitor, along with defining tag options for ECS labels. This flexibility allows for a tailored monitoring experience that aligns with the specific needs of an ECS environment, thereby enhancing observability and control over containerized applications.

New Relic

This plugin writes metrics to New Relic Insights utilizing the Metrics API, which provides a robust mechanism for sending time series data to the New Relic platform. Users must first obtain an Insights API Key to authenticate and authorize their data submissions. The plugin is designed to facilitate easy integration with New Relic’s monitoring and analytics capabilities, supporting a variety of metric types and allowing for efficient data handling. Core features include the ability to add prefixes to metrics for better identification, customizable timeouts for API requests, and support for proxy settings to enhance connectivity. It is essential for users to configure these options according to their requirements, enabling seamless data flow into New Relic for comprehensive real-time analytics and insights.

Configuration

Amazon ECS

[[inputs.ecs]]
  # endpoint_url = ""
  # container_name_include = []
  # container_name_exclude = []
  # container_status_include = []
  # container_status_exclude = []
  ecs_label_include = [ "com.amazonaws.ecs.*" ]
  ecs_label_exclude = []
  # timeout = "5s"

[[inputs.ecs]]
  endpoint_url = "http://169.254.170.2"
  # container_name_include = []
  # container_name_exclude = []
  # container_status_include = []
  # container_status_exclude = []
  ecs_label_include = [ "com.amazonaws.ecs.*" ]
  ecs_label_exclude = []
  # timeout = "5s"

New Relic

[[outputs.newrelic]]
  ## The 'insights_key' parameter requires a NR license key.
  ## New Relic recommends you create one
  ## with a convenient name such as TELEGRAF_INSERT_KEY.
  ## reference: https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/apis/intro-apis/new-relic-api-keys/#ingest-license-key
  # insights_key = "New Relic License Key Here"

  ## Prefix to add to add to metric name for easy identification.
  ## This is very useful if your metric names are ambiguous.
  # metric_prefix = ""

  ## Timeout for writes to the New Relic API.
  # timeout = "15s"

  ## HTTP Proxy override. If unset use values from the standard
  ## proxy environment variables to determine proxy, if any.
  # http_proxy = "http://corporate.proxy:3128"

  ## Metric URL override to enable geographic location endpoints.
  # If not set use values from the standard
  # metric_url = "https://metric-api.newrelic.com/metric/v1"

Input and output integration examples

Amazon ECS

1. Dynamic Container Monitoring: Use the Amazon ECS plugin to monitor container health dynamically within an autoscaling ECS architecture. As new containers spin up or down, the plugin will automatically adjust the metrics it collects, ensuring that each container’s performance data is captured efficiently without manual configuration.

2. Custom Resource Allocation Alerts: Implement the ECS plugin to establish thresholds for resource usage per container. By integrating with notification systems, teams can receive alerts when a container’s CPU or memory usage exceeds predefined limits, enabling proactive resource management and maintaining application performance.

3. Cost-Optimization Dashboard: Leverage the metrics gathered from the ECS plugin to create a dashboard that visualizes resource usage and costs associated with each container. This insight allows organizations to identify underutilized resources, optimizing costs associated with their container infrastructure, thus driving financial efficiency in cloud operations.

4. Advanced Container Security Monitoring: Utilize this plugin in conjunction with security tools to monitor ECS container metrics for anomalies. By continuously analyzing usage patterns, any sudden spikes or irregular behaviors can be detected, prompting automated security responses and maintaining system integrity.

New Relic

1. Application Performance Monitoring: Use the New Relic Telegraf plugin to send application performance metrics from a web service to New Relic Insights. By integrating this plugin, developers can collect data such as response times, error rates, and throughput, enabling teams to monitor application health in real-time and resolve issues quickly before they impact users. This setup promotes proactive management of application performance and user experience.

2. Infrastructure Metrics Aggregation: Leverage this plugin to aggregate and send system-level metrics (CPU usage, memory consumption, etc.) from various servers to New Relic. This helps system administrators maintain an comprehensive view of infrastructure performance, facilitating capacity planning and identifying potential bottlenecks. By centralizing metrics in New Relic, teams can visualize trends over time and make informed decisions regarding resource allocation.

3. Dynamic Metric Naming for Multi-tenant Applications: Implement dynamic prefixing with the metric_prefix option to differentiate between different tenants in a multi-tenant application. By configuring the plugin to include a unique identifier per tenant in the metric names, teams can analyze usage patterns and performance metrics per tenant. This provides valuable insights into tenant behavior, supporting tailored optimizations and enhancing service quality across different customer segments.

4. Real-time Anomaly Detection: Combine the New Relic plugin with alerting mechanisms to trigger notifications based on unusual metric patterns. By sending metrics such as request counts and response times, teams can set thresholds in New Relic that, when breached, will automatically alert responsible parties. This user-driven approach supports immediate responses to potential issues before they escalate into larger incidents.

Feedback

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