Amazon CloudWatch and Thanos Integration
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Powerful Performance, Limitless Scale
Collect, organize, and act on massive volumes of high-velocity data. Any data is more valuable when you think of it as time series data. with InfluxDB, the #1 time series platform built to scale with Telegraf.
See Ways to Get Started
Input and output integration overview
This plugin will pull Metric Statistics from Amazon CloudWatch, streamlining the process of monitoring and analyzing AWS resources.
This plugin sends metrics from Telegraf to Thanos using the Prometheus remote write protocol over HTTP, allowing efficient and scalable ingestion into Thanos Receive components.
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.
Thanos
Telegraf’s HTTP plugin can send metrics directly to Thanos via its Remote Write-compatible Receive component. By setting the data format to prometheusremotewrite
, Telegraf can serialize metrics into the same protobuf-based format used by native Prometheus clients. This setup enables high-throughput, low-latency metric ingestion into Thanos, facilitating centralized observability at scale. It is particularly useful in hybrid environments where Telegraf is collecting metrics from systems outside Prometheus’ native reach, such as SNMP devices, Windows hosts, or custom apps, and streams them directly to Thanos for long-term storage and global querying.
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"
Thanos
[[outputs.http]]
## Thanos Receive endpoint for remote write
url = "http://thanos-receive.example.com/api/v1/receive"
## HTTP method
method = "POST"
## Data format set to Prometheus remote write
data_format = "prometheusremotewrite"
## Optional headers (authorization, etc.)
# [outputs.http.headers]
# Authorization = "Bearer YOUR_TOKEN"
## Optional TLS configuration
# tls_ca = "/path/to/ca.pem"
# tls_cert = "/path/to/cert.pem"
# tls_key = "/path/to/key.pem"
# insecure_skip_verify = false
## Request timeout
timeout = "10s"
Input and output integration examples
Amazon CloudWatch
-
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. -
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.
-
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.
-
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.
Thanos
-
Agentless Cloud Monitoring: Deploy Telegraf agents across cloud VMs to collect system and application metrics, then stream them directly into Thanos using Remote Write. This provides centralized observability without requiring Prometheus nodes at each location.
-
Scalable Windows Host Monitoring: Use Telegraf on Windows machines to collect OS-level metrics and send them via Remote Write to Thanos Receive. This enables observability across heterogeneous environments with native Prometheus support only on Linux.
-
Cross-Region Metrics Federation: Telegraf agents in multiple geographic regions can push data to region-local Thanos Receivers using this plugin. From there, Thanos can deduplicate and query metrics globally, reducing latency and network egress costs.
-
Integrating Third-Party Data into Thanos: Collect metrics from custom telemetry sources such as REST APIs or proprietary logs using Telegraf inputs and forward them to Thanos via Remote Write. This brings non-native data into a Prometheus-compatible, long-term analytics pipeline.
Feedback
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Powerful Performance, Limitless Scale
Collect, organize, and act on massive volumes of high-velocity data. Any data is more valuable when you think of it as time series data. with InfluxDB, the #1 time series platform built to scale with Telegraf.
See Ways to Get Started
Related Integrations
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