Amazon CloudWatch Metric Streams

Amazon CloudWatch Metric Streams is an AWS service that creates a real-time stream of metrics to a destination of your choice. To stream your AWS data to New Relic, you can create a custom Firehose that forwards AWS metrics to our CloudWatch Metric Streams integration. This lets you view your AWS data in the New Relic platform.

A screenshot that shows an example dashboard of AWS data in New Relic

Once you forward your AWS data to New Relic, you can view your data in a dashboard.

Choose your set-up method

Set minimum permissions

Before you integrate, you need to set certain permissions so New Relic can access your AWS data. At minimum, you need to create a ReadOnlyAccess policy and apply these minimum permissions to the AWS roles associated with New Relic:

config:BatchGetResourceConfig
config:ListDiscoveredResources
elasticache:DescribeCacheClusters
tag:GetResources

Depending on your set up, your configuration requirements may vary:

Integrate CloudWatch Metric Streams

Once your permissions are set, you can set up the CloudWatch Metric Streams integration. We have a few different methods depending on your preference:

  • You can follow our in-app guided install, which directs you to the New Relic platform where you'll create CloudFormation template for CloudWatch Metric Streams.
  • You can follow some procedures that use AWS Console to create resources yourself.
  • If you're currently using API polling, this doc helps you migrate to CloudWatch Metric Streams.

Validate that your data appears in New Relic

To confirm you're receiving data from the Metric Streams, follow these steps:

  1. Go to one.newrelic.com > All capabilities > Infrastructure > AWS. Search for the AWS account you've connected to New Relic. Stream accounts.
  2. Check the account status dashboard and confirm that New Relic receives the metric data. This may include errors and number of namespaces and metrics ingested.
  3. Explore your data by writing queries for specififc sets of metrics.

It may take few minutes for New Relic to detect new resources and synthesize them as entities.

Tip

AWS CloudWatch metrics for global services, such AWS Billing, are only availble in the us-east-1 region. Make sure there's an active CloudWatch metric stream configured in that region.

What's next?

Now that you can view your AWS data, we recommend that you: