Amazon CloudWatch and Splunk Integration

Input and output integration overview

This plugin will pull Metric Statistics from Amazon CloudWatch, streamlining the process of monitoring and analyzing AWS resources.

This output plugin facilitates direct streaming of Telegraf collected metrics into Splunk via the HTTP Event Collector, enabling easy integration with Splunk’s powerful analytics platform.

Integration details

Amazon CloudWatch

The Amazon CloudWatch Plugin allows users to pull detailed metric statistics from Amazon’s CloudWatch service. As a monitoring solution, CloudWatch enables users to track various metrics related to AWS resources and applications, facilitating improved operational and performance insights. The plugin uses a structured authentication method that prioritizes security and flexibility through a combination of STS (Security Token Service), shared credentials, environment variables, and EC2 instance profiles, ensuring robust access control to AWS resources. Key features include the ability to define specific metric namespaces, aggregated periods for metrics, and optional inclusion of linked accounts for cross-account monitoring. A significant aspect of this plugin is its capacity to handle both sparse and dense metric formats, allowing for varied output structures depending on user preference. Thus, it supports versatile use cases in cloud monitoring and analytics by providing comprehensive, timely data directly from CloudWatch.

Splunk

Use Telegraf to easily collect and aggregate metrics from many different sources and send them to Splunk. Utilizing the HTTP output plugin combined with the specialized Splunk metrics serializer, this configuration ensures efficient data ingestion into Splunk’s metrics indexes. The HEC is an advanced mechanism provided by Splunk designed to reliably collect data at scale via HTTP or HTTPS, providing critical capabilities for security, monitoring, and analytics workloads. Telegraf’s integration with Splunk HEC streamlines operations by leveraging standard HTTP protocols, built-in authentication, and structured data serialization, optimizing metrics ingestion and enabling immediate actionable insights.

Configuration

Amazon CloudWatch

[[inputs.cloudwatch]]
  region = "us-east-1"
  # access_key = ""
  # secret_key = ""
  # token = ""
  # role_arn = ""
  # web_identity_token_file = ""
  # role_session_name = ""
  # profile = ""
  # shared_credential_file = ""
  # include_linked_accounts = false
  # endpoint_url = ""
  # use_system_proxy = false
  # http_proxy_url = "http://localhost:8888"
  period = "5m"
  delay = "5m"
  interval = "5m"
  #recently_active = "PT3H"
  # cache_ttl = "1h"
  namespaces = ["AWS/ELB"]
  # metric_format = "sparse"
  # ratelimit = 25
  # timeout = "5s"
  # batch_size = 500
  # statistic_include = ["average", "sum", "minimum", "maximum", sample_count]
  # statistic_exclude = []
  # [[inputs.cloudwatch.metrics]]
  #  names = ["Latency", "RequestCount"]
  #  [[inputs.cloudwatch.metrics.dimensions]]
  #    name = "LoadBalancerName"
  #    value = "p-example"

Splunk

[[outputs.http]]
  ## Splunk HTTP Event Collector endpoint
  url = "https://splunk.example.com:8088/services/collector"

  ## HTTP method to use
  method = "POST"

  ## Splunk authentication token
  headers = {"Authorization" = "Splunk YOUR_SPLUNK_HEC_TOKEN"}

  ## Serializer for formatting metrics specifically for Splunk
  data_format = "splunkmetric"

  ## Optional parameters
  # timeout = "5s"
  # insecure_skip_verify = false
  # tls_ca = "/path/to/ca.pem"
  # tls_cert = "/path/to/cert.pem"
  # tls_key = "/path/to/key.pem"

Input and output integration examples

Amazon CloudWatch

1. Cross-Account Monitoring: Utilize this plugin to monitor resources across multiple AWS accounts by enabling the include_linked_accounts option. This scenario allows companies managing multiple AWS accounts to aggregate metrics into a central monitoring dashboard, providing a unified view of all metrics while ensuring secure data access and compliance through proper role management.

2. Dynamic Alerting System: Integrate this plugin with alerting tools to create an automated system that triggers alerts based on defined thresholds for CloudWatch metrics. For instance, if latency metrics exceed specified limits, alerts can be sent to relevant teams, enabling proactive responses to performance issues and reducing downtime.

3. Cost Management Dashboard: Use the metrics gathered from the plugin to build a cost management dashboard that visualizes AWS service usage metrics over time. By correlating these metrics with billing data, organizations can identify high-cost services and take informed actions to optimize their resource usage and spending.

4. Performance Benchmarking for Applications: Leverage the metrics collected from applications running on AWS to perform performance benchmarks. For example, by tracking latency and request count metrics for an ELB, developers can assess the impact of application changes on its performance, making data-driven decisions for optimization.

Splunk

1. Real-Time Security Analytics: Utilize this plugin to stream security-related metrics from various applications into Splunk in real-time. Organizations can detect threats instantly by correlating data streams across systems, significantly reducing detection and response times.

2. Multi-Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring: Integrate Telegraf to consolidate metrics from multi-cloud environments directly into Splunk, enabling comprehensive visibility and operational intelligence. This unified monitoring allows teams to detect performance issues quickly and streamline cloud resource management.

3. Dynamic Capacity Planning: Deploy the plugin to continuously push resource metrics from container orchestration platforms (like Kubernetes) into Splunk. Leveraging Splunk’s analytics capabilities, teams can automate predictive scaling and resource allocation, avoiding resource bottlenecks and minimizing costs.

4. Automated Incident Response Workflows: Combine this plugin with Splunk’s alerting system to create automated incident response workflows. Metrics collected by Telegraf trigger real-time alerts and automated remediation scripts, ensuring rapid resolution and maintaining high system availability.

Feedback

Thank you for being part of our community! If you have any general feedback or found any bugs on these pages, we welcome and encourage your input. Please submit your feedback in the InfluxDB community Slack.