Amazon CloudWatch ( YAML )
Last updated
Last updated
Apica Ascent connects to Amazon CloudWatch using the boto3 client with the help of the AWS CloudWatch data source making it easy for you to query CloudWatch metrics using its natural syntax, analyze, monitor, and create Visualization of data.
Before you query your CloudWatch data, you should set up authentication credentials. Credentials for your AWS account can be found in the IAM Console. You can create or use an existing user. Go to manage access keys and generate a new set of keys.
The first step is to create an Amazon CloudWatch data source and provide all details such as the Name, AWS Region, AWS Access Key, AWS Secret Key
Name: Name of the Data Source
AWS Region: Region of your AWS account
AWS Access Key: access_key_id of your IAM Role
AWS Secret Key: secret_access_key of your IAM Role
These instructions assume you are familiar with the CloudWatch ad-hoc query language. To make exploring your data easier the schema browser will show which Namespaces and Metrics ( optionally dimensions ) you can query.
Apica Ascent includes a simple point-and-click wizard for creating CloudWatch queries. You can launch the query wizard by selecting the CloudWatch YAML data source and selecting the "Construct CloudWatch query" icon.
In the query designer, you can select the Namespace, Metric, and Dimensions along with the Stat. You can add one or more Namespaces, Metric using a simple point-and-click interface.
You are now ready to run and plot the metric. Running Execute will automatically create the built-in line graph for your metric. You can further create additional visualizations using "New Visualization".
For the curious, here is a breakdown of the YAML syntax and what the various attributes mean. NOTE: You don't need to write or type these to query data. The No-code built-in WYSIWYG editor makes it easy to query CloudWatch without writing any code. Let us look at the YAML syntax now. It should be an array of MetricDataQuery objects under a key called MetricsDataQueries.
Here's an example that sends MetricDataQuery
Your query can include the following keys:
LogGroupName
string
LogGroupNames
array of strings
StartTime
integer or timestring
EndTime
integer or timestring
QueryString
string
Limit
integer
Let's look at a slightly more complex example and query AWS Lambda metrics for AWS Lambda Errors. In this example, we are using the MetricName: "Errors" for the "AWS/Lambda" Namespace.
When selecting the AWS/Lambda Namespace, you can see the available MetricNames
AWS/Lambda
Errors
ConcurrentExecutions
Invocations
Throttles
Duration
IteratorAge
UnreservedConcurrentExecutions
Below is an example query that tracks AWS Lambda errors as an aggregate metric. The StartTime is templatized and allows dynamic selection.
You can further click on the Errors MetricName and it will expand to show you Dimensions available for further querying. For AWS/Lambda, the Dimension FunctionName provides further drill down to show Cloudwatch metrics by Lambda Function Name.
The query can be further enhanced by making the lambda function name, a templatized parameter. This allows you to pull metrics using a dropdown selection e.g. a list of lambda functions. The FunctionName template below can also be retrieved from another database as a separate query.
An expression can be a mathematical expression of metrics or an sql query.
Each list item in the MetricDataQueries list in the above mentioned examples can contain either an Expression or a MetricStat Query item. we can provide a combination of both also.
In the above example the second item uses MetricStat syntax to fetch data and the first item uses expression syntax to fetch the data. here, first item is used to perform a math expression on the data fetched by second item.
In the above example first and second items are used to fetch metric data. the third item is used to perform a mathematical expression on the data fetched using the first and second items.
The period indicates granularity and stat indicates the group by operation to be performed on the fetched data.
or
for some detailed information on querying cloud-watch metrics, follow the below links https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/APIReference/API_GetMetricData.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/cloudwatch/get-metric-data.html
