New Relic offers several methods to collect performance data about your Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. Once you've connected New Relic with AWS, you get total visibility into AWS telemetry data, letting you closely monitor the health of your AWS stack.
Integrate New Relic with your AWS stack
To get started, you need to establish a connection between New Relic and your AWS services. Establishing the initial connection integrates New Relic into your AWS stack so you can access additional integrations within the AWS ecosystem.
Here are options to get started:
AWS solution | New Relic integration method |
|---|---|
CloudWatch Metric Streams | Set up Cloudwatch Metric Streams integration (Recommended) |
Amazon EC2 instances | Install the infrastructure agent with CloudFormation template |
AWS GovCloud (US) | |
AWS System Manager Distributor | Install the infrastructure agent on AWS System Manager Distributor |
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) | |
Connect to the AWS Polling API | Create new roles and policies to poll and send metric data to New Relic |
View your AWS data
Once installed and configured, you can access data from your AWS services directly in the New Relic platform. Go to one.newrelic.com > All capabilities > Amazon Web Services.
- To learn more about exploring your AWS data, check out our doc about understanding and using data from infrastructure integrations.
- We also recommend reviewing our doc specifically about AWS integration metrics, too.
Amazon CloudWatch Metric streams and API polling
We strongly recommend that you use the CloudWatch Metric Streams integration as it directly connects with the metric streams repository holding your AWS metric data. You may have a stack that requires instrumentation with our API Polling integrations, however. For example, these AWS services aren't currently supported by the CloudWatch Metric Streams integration:
- AWS CloudTrail
- AWS Health
- AWS Trusted Advisor
- AWS X-Ray
- AWS VPC Flow Logs
- AWS CloudFormation
Integrations and AWS costs
This section directs you to relevant AWS docs that explain how our integrations affect your AWS billing.
- The AWS CloudWatch Pricing pagedefines AWS CloudWatch metric streams pricing based on the number of metric updates.
- We sometimes use AWS Kinesis Data Firehose as the delivery method from AWS to New Relic, so we recommend reviewing the AWS Firehose pricing page.
- When you enable AWS Config to enrich CloudWatch metrics with resource metadata, you're charged based on the number of configuration items recorded. See the AWS Config pricing page for details.
- AWS Resource Groups Tagging API enriches metrics with custom tags defined in the associated AWS resources. This affects both polling and metric streams.
New Relic uses the Amazon CloudWatch API to obtain metrics from your AWS services when you use the API Polling integration instead of CloudWatch Metric Streams. Some situations may increase the number of calls to the CloudWatch API to exceed the 1 million free limits granted by AWS and increase your CloudWatch bill. This may happen when you:
- Enable additional integrations through API Polling
- Add AWS resources to those integrations
- Scale those integrations across more regions.
AWS offers enhanced monitoring for some of their services that allows for more metrics at a higher frequency. You can check out RDS enhanced monitoring costs for more information.
Region availability
Most AWS services offer regional endpoints to reduce data latency between cloud resources and applications. New Relic can obtain monitoring data from services and endpoints that are located in all AWS regions, except China.