Sysdig Extends Prometheus Monitoring to Amazon CloudWatch

Sysdig today announced support for five Amazon Web Service (AWS) services to make it easier to use Prometheus with Amazon CloudWatch. Sysdig added support for AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda, AWS Application Load Balancer (AWS ALB), AWS Elastic Load Balancer (AWS ELB), and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to PromCat.io, the company’s free repository of curated Prometheus compatibility options. The support packages come with an exporter, documentation, dashboards, and alerts created by Sysdig. The goal is to help developers save time when connecting Prometheus monitoring for visibility across cloud infrastructure and AWS managed services.

Sysdig will continue to add more support for AWS to PromCat, which launched in March, with the goal of supporting the most popular AWS services by the end of the year. While the commercial Sysdig Secure DevOps Platform provides support for most AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), the free options are new to PromCat.

In supporting five more AWS services, Sysdig realized the need for a production-grade Prometheus exporter for Amazon CloudWatch. The company ended up contributing improvements to an already created open source exporter for Amazon CloudWatch to enhance its readiness for scale and production use. Key improvements focused on stability, security, and optimizing the API calls to reduce the costs of Amazon CloudWatch metrics usage.

As organizations adopt cloud-native solutions, lack of visibility and security are the biggest barriers for adoption. The ultimate goal of moving to the cloud is being able to maximize availability and innovate faster. Popular among AWS users, Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service that provides data and actionable insights when monitoring applications, allowing Ops engineers, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT managers to respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health. In addition, many developers standardize on open source Prometheus monitoring to gain insight. Prometheus is a powerful tool, but it comes with scaling and integration challenges. Sysdig continues to work in step with AWS and the cloud-native market to make the process of instrumenting containers and Kubernetes more accessible with support for Prometheus monitoring.

“Our business relies on Kubernetes and container services being up, running, and performing well. Sysdig helps us monitor the health and performance of our deployments at scale, and gives us rich data, including Prometheus metrics, that helps us understand and resolve issues quickly,” said Ryan Staatz, site reliability engineer, LogDNA. “The new Prometheus integrations will make it easier to monitor our solution running on AWS.”

Benefits of AWS support in PromCat

• Retain Prometheus investment: For developers that have invested in Prometheus but need additional monitoring solutions, such as Amazon CloudWatch, Sysdig can allow them to retain their investment in Prometheus and the PromQL language.
• Accelerated container adoption: Having validated support with documentation can save weeks of effort by reducing developer time spent researching and maintaining Prometheus integrations.
• Deeper cloud-native visibility: Developers that want more metrics can use Prometheus in conjunction with Amazon CloudWatch to have visibility across their environment including AWS managed services.

Benefits of integrations to Sysdig customers

• Cloud scale: Sysdig provides customers a scalable solution for Prometheus. Sysdig launched full compatibility with Prometheus in March, which addresses the issues that hold teams back from the organization-wide adoption of Prometheus monitoring: scale, data retention, and enterprise access controls.
• Consolidated tools: Sysdig supports a secure DevOps approach by integrating monitoring and security into a single platform. When companies integrate security into the DevOps process with Sysdig, they are able to unify teams on the same data source, which ultimately eliminates bottlenecks and increases software release velocity.
• Single-pane view across hybrid cloud: The Sysdig Secure DevOps Platform collects and correlates granular data from infrastructure, services, and applications across multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, and on-premises environments to provide a consistent, single view of the entire infrastructure. Without a macro view of the environment, it is difficult to anticipate issues with microservices that have cross-platform dependencies. In the event of an issue, having system-wide visibility can facilitate quicker resolutions.
• Support: Sysdig offers customers 24/7 support.

“AWS is a trusted cloud provider for companies operating containers and Kubernetes,” said Suresh Vasudevan, chief executive officer, Sysdig. “Extending Prometheus monitoring capabilities to AWS customers enables AWS to expand on Amazon CloudWatch and provide a unified monitoring experience across services, applications, on-premises, and in the cloud.”