Amazon CloudWatch now monitors Prometheus metrics from Container environments

Posted on: Sep 8, 2020

You can use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor Prometheus metrics from Amazon Elastic Containers (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), AWS Fargate, and Kubernetes clusters, now publicly available. With this new feature, DevOps teams can automatically discover services for containerized workloads such as AWS App Mesh and Java/JMX. They can also expose custom metrics on those services, and ingest the Prometheus metrics in CloudWatch. By curating the collection and aggregation of Prometheus metrics, CloudWatch users can monitor, troubleshoot, and alarm on application performance degradation and failures faster while reducing the number of monitoring tools required. 

Prometheus is a popular open source monitoring project, part of the Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF). The open source community has built over 150 plugins and defined a framework that DevOps teams can use to expose custom metrics to be collected using a pull-based approach from their applications.

It’s easy to get started. You can start collecting Prometheus metrics from your Amazon ECS, EKS, and Kubernetes clusters by running just one command. Metrics are available in the CloudWatch console under CloudWatch metrics and Container Insights. See Prometheus metrics installation and setup for more details. You can also check AWS Region availability, and learn about pricing on the CloudWatch pricing page. You can also use https://observability.workshop.aws to learn more about all the Amazon CloudWatch observability offerings.